Introduction

Psychoanalysis has had more to say about morbid psychological states than about healthy ones. This is understandable since the discipline was born in a clinical context. Emotional suffering in the form of mental conflict, anxiety, paranoia, dread, misplaced lust, punishing conscience, and melancholic withdrawal became its customary concerns. Psychoanalysts became clinicians of despair and misery was ensconced as the mother-tongue of their profession. The fact that the discipline’s founder, Sigmund Freud, held a rather dismal view of human nature furthered this dark inclination. The stoic ethics of such ‘classic vision’ was challenged by analysts who subscribed to a softer, ‘romantic vision’. They replaced Freud’s ‘primary narcissism’ and ‘instinctual discharge’ with ‘primary love’ and ‘object seeking’. Human goodness in the former perspective was defensive or sublimatory. Human goodness in the latter perspective was intrinsic and natural.