Ester Buchholz, 71, NYU Psychologist Urged ‘Solitude’

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Ester Buchholz, whose death last Tuesday at age 71 was announced by New York University, was a professor of psychology whose 1997 book “The Call of Solitude” urged readers to spend more time on their own in order to facilitate better mental health.


Noting that increased human population and electronic interconnectedness made the experience of solitude rarer than in former times, Buchholz wrote, “The need for genuine and constructive aloneness has gotten utterly lost and, in the process, so have we.” She peppered her book with stories of patients who regained mental balance by setting aside time in their day to read, think, or just stare out the window.


“Psychology is only just beginning to distinguish aloneness from loneliness,” Buchholz wrote. “Longing for a lover, relative, or friend is not the cause of loneliness, nor is finding someone necessarily the cure.”


Buchholz hopefully coined the word “alonetime” to describe her prescription for a world run riot in social demands; it has not caught on.


Buchholz, a professor at the Department of Applied Psychology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, also had a research interest in what she described as the “origins of badness and goodness in children.” She felt that there was a developmental need for children to be bad, and that such behaviors “have little to do with pathology or deviance.”


She had been the director of the NYU master’s program in the psychology of parenthood.


Buchholz also co-edited “Ego and Self Psychology: Group Interventions with Children, Adolescents, and Parents” (1983), and published frequently on family and child psychology.


Buchholz is survived by her husband, Leonard Wolf, M.D.; three sons, Gary Fineman, David Buchholz, and Phillip Buchholz; two stepchildren, Melissa Wolf and Megan Wolf, and five grandchildren.


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