Intimacy and Solitude

Rating:
Summary: Intimacy and Solitude
Review: I cannot recommend this book enough. I have been going through a highly introspective, difficult and insightful stage in life the past year. I have been through lots of individual counseling and read countless self-help books. I rate this one higher than any other.

Dowricks' work on the theme of "differentiation" and how it affects you in your relationship with yourself and others gets at the very core of the matter. There are very few issues, whether they be relationships, sex, addictions, etc., which cannot be traced back to this fundamental issue.

I have much respect for many different self-help/life-coach authors, and appreciate their work very much. Dowricks', though, while not an easy read, stands above the rest in cultivating fundamental insight. Providing insight, not prescription, appears to her objective with regards to writing style.

Many books inspire or help one to act. To take charge of their lives. But they fail to get down to the very core. The raw, organic, fundamental issues. In reading Intimacy and Solitude I gained new insight into "the" issue that no one can escape (and many choose not to address): one's own experience of one's self as an individual separate person. This experience is so fundamental because of the truth that, as Dowrick states, "you cannot know anyone else better than you know yourself."

Dowrick digs into the origins of one's sense of self and then explores its manifestations in one's capacity for solitude and for intimacy. Particularly insightful to me were insights into the feeling of "desire", a topic I have never before seen addressed.

This book is higly insightful, but not very prescriptive. There are no self-evaluation exercises or tactics to try. Just plain raw insight into the deepest most fundamental parts of one's self. As a man, I disagree with a previous review that thought Dowrick's "feminism" was a distraction. Not an easy read, but highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: I was given this book as a Christmas gift the year I divorced my husband of 10 years. It's a difficult book to read, simply because it raises so many different issues that should be examined and thought about before moving on. Ms. Dowrick has written several excellent books and I'm very happy to have started with this one. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: thoughtful, well written
Review: I've been reading similar books in this genre, including Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Jeffers), Mastery of Love (Ruiz), Heart of the Matter (Austin) and now this one. This book pulls together many of the themes percolating through the other listed books and is well worth reading (alone or with these books). It's not easy or light reading, but having finished it I can tell I'll refer back to this book often, now just to browse through particular sections. I lost count of the times she would describe a particular situation or issue and I'd immediately picture an example of that, either in my life or in those of people I know. I tend toward the overly analytical and as such I appreciated the depth and scope of the look she took at these twinned (though most people would not think so) concepts. If you're at all interested in self discovery, read this! I like books that make me think; this definitely does so.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent book
Review: this book has provided me with some very valuable insights into myself and my relationships. Well written, good mix of examples and psychoanalytical theories.

Rating:
Summary: An Almost Perfect Book of Self-Discovery
Review: This MIGHT HAVE BEEN the greatest self-help book ever written.

It is filled with deep insights, and bears rereading. The author looks at two very different aspects of life - solitude and intimacy, and discovers how they are inter-connected. Her discovery is truly original and important: that true intimacy cannot be achieved without a strong sense of self, and that some measure of solitude is necessary in order to cultivate this authenticity.

It is clear that the author did not just slap words down on paper. This book is the product of some very long sleepless nights of deep reflection. She looks at life from the perspective of someone who has drunk deeply from the well of experience, and knows that life is intrinsically difficult and problemmatic.

Unfortunately, this book is marred by one glaring flaw: she lets her feminism show too much throughout the work. This turned me off repeatedly, and it will no doubt turn off a lot of potential male readers. And that is unfortunate, because men could certainly profit from this book. The occasional undertone of "woman as victim of male domination" is completely unacceptable in such a work.

Nonetheless if the male reader can overcome this inescapably feminist bias, he will profit hightly from the great insights which this book offers.