The Rightbrain Child as Father to the Left-Brain Man : SOLITUDE A Return to the Self<i> by Anthony Storr (The Free Press / Macmillan: $17.95; 216 pp.) </i>

In “Solitude: A Return to the Self,” Oxford psychotherapist Anthony Storr offers an engaging defense of one of two ways of thinking. The two ways have been called splitting and lumping, and are presently trendy topics under the heading of left-brain and rightbrain. (Splitting left-brain and lumping rightbrain are deliberately written like that, as a mnemonic for which is which. Another mnemonic for married people is that the rightbrain governs the finger wearing the metallic emblem of wholeness.)

It “began,” so to speak, with Plato and his equally gifted pupil Aristotle. Plato, claiming the field early, was the all-time lumper: We’re surrounded by nothing but distortions of the singular Form. Aristotle shot back with the splitter’s eternal delight in parting matter into rivulets of ever-narrowing categories, dividing and conquering. It got to the point centuries later that somebody like Coleridge could observe that everyone was either an Aristotelian or a Platonist; a splitter’s view of human nature, of course. Anthony Storr, who has written for these pages, gets to the splitter side after having written, among other significant works, a defense of the lumper side 28 years ago--”The Integrity of the Personality”--and before the left-brain/rightbrain terminology had taken hold.

Julian Jaynes has covered some of this ground very lightly in his controversial classic, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” of a few years back. But Storr is perhaps writing more in the tradition of Kierkegaard. In “Either/Or,” the Danish philosopher celebrated first the aesthetic life and then the ethical one. Storr, with mostly composers in mind, offers evidence to suggest that people grow more left-brained as they age. Such an observation does fit his own career, at least, which swings from the social view of man to the insular view he now espouses.

“If we were to listen only to the psychoanalytic ‘object-relations’ theorists, we should be driven to conclude that none of us have validity as isolated individuals,” Storr now writes. “Perhaps the need of the creative person for solitude, and his preoccupation with internal processes of integration, can reveal something about the needs of the less gifted, more ordinary human being. . . .”

Storr applies a wide reading in literature and an amateur’s delight in music appreciation, as well as equal parts of Jung and Freud, to his meditations, which are grouped under such headings as “The Uses of Solitude,” “Enforced Solitude” (in which victims of imprisonment are seen to sharpen their wits), and “Bereavement, Depression and Repair.”

Storr has set out, in other words, to correct what he sees as an imbalance in psychoanalytic theory. The “object-relations” people such as Peter Marris and John Bowlby--for whom the “objects” are in fact other people--have, Storr fears, imposed on the human landscape an overly social view.

The solitaries who interest Storr, he writes, “correspond with the people described as introvert by Jung; as convergers by Hudson; as patterners by Gardener,” and so on. Each of these terms is half of a polar pair (with extraverts, divergers and dramatists corresponding on the right), and Storr also aligns Wilhelm Worringer’s art-history pair, “abstraction and empathy.” The proliferation of jargon is itself the mark of an idea in the budding stage, and left-brain/rightbrain does seem to be what the fuss is about.

Storr is appealingly frank about his own evolution from lumper to splitter. He admits on Page 147 that “in an earlier book, I stressed the need for interpersonal relationships in the maturing of personality.” After quoting a passage from his 1960 work that seems to rebut his present thesis, Storr then says in 1988, “I still believe this; but I want to add a rider to the effect that maturation and integration can take place within the isolated individual to a greater extent than I have allowed for.”

The danger in correcting a balance, of course, is that your own efforts may appear distortively one-sided. In his discussion of Henry James, for instance, Storr is using as his critical tool a model according to which artists, as they age, grow increasingly abstract, analytic, indifferent to their public--in short, more left-brained. Storr is a good enough reader, though, to see that James’ late novels don’t follow this sloping model but in fact achieve a stable balance between feelings and analysis. “What is interesting is that James, in ‘The Ambassadors,’ exhibits the preoccupation with pattern and order already noted as characteristic of the third period, combined with a determination to preach the gospel of living life to the full, which, in other artists, would be more typically associated with earlier periods in their work.” The appeal of this balance bothers Storr, but his model obliges him to conclude: “So James’ third period is out of kilter.” No, here it’s the critic’s frame that’s tilted.

In one of his notebooks, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind--and not lose the ability to function.” Even in the midst of a panegyric to splitting (away from people, into solitude), Storr acknowledges the rightbrain’s visions of connectedness. Several of his solitary explorers report on what Storr calls “the oceanic feeling,” that momentary sense of the cosmos fitting around your soul like a glove. It’s happened to enough people often enough for Freud to have had to dismiss it as an illusion. Yet for all his left-braining, Storr is sufficiently uneasy with this dismissal to suspect aloud that Freud may have overlooked something important.

Goethe, like Fitzgerald, got it right. According to Jung, whom Storr quotes, the German poet once referred to extraversion and introversion as diastole and systole. That is to say, like the heart’s surges, an unstable twinned opposition of impulses, essential to life.

Rhythm--built into us in pulse-beat and breath--seems to keep our intellectual culture alive too. People keep taking extreme positions and then correcting themselves or each other. I like to think of it--the march of ideas--as the way we climb a ladder: one foot to the left of your center of gravity, one foot to the right, and so on and up we go. With ideas, though, it’s easier to miss that ladder’s-edge between correction and overcompensation.

Storr, with his anecdotal accounts of benevolent misanthropes and reclusive artists, is surely right to mediate--or to try to mediate--between the extreme claims of left-brain and rightbrain, even though he doesn’t call the two polar modes of thought by their supposed hemispheres of origin. To the extent that, across his distinguished career, Storr does pursue the balanced view--the ambidextrous juggler’s sense of human nature--the title is perhaps unfair to his book. It might be better called “Solitude and Company.”