Akhtar - Good stuff : courage, resilience, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and sacrifice

Acknowledgments

A number of psychoanalytic colleagues have helped sharpen my thinking about the themes contained in this book. Some have reviewed earlier drafts of these chapters. Others have offered valuable comments in an informal way. Still others have brought important reading material to my attention. Prominent among these individuals are my wife Dr. Monisha Akhtar, and Drs. Ira Brenner, Jennifer Bonovitz, Ralph and Lana Fishkin, Axel Hoffer, Susan Levine, Afaf Mahfouz, Frank Maleson, Henri Parens, Nadia Ramzy, Shahrzad Siassi, Melvin Singer, Stuart Twemlow, and Vamik Volkan. Dr. Michael Vergare, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Jefferson Medical College (my academic base for over thirty years) has offered unwavering support for my intellectual pursuits. Drs. Rajnish Mago and Stephen Schwartz have been critically sound readers of my scribblings. And, within the Jefferson family, Drs. Solange Margery Bertoglia, Jonathan Beatty, Karl Doghramji, and Deanna Nobleza have provided useful holding functions and, in this indirect fashion, supported my creativity. My good friend, Dr. J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., introduced me to the ethological and evolution-related literature and thus greatly enriched my understanding of phenomena addressed in this book. Ms. Smita Kamble put me in touch with Mr. Stephen Crawford, who was kind enough to share his unpublished work on generosity with me. Dr. Glenda Wrenn and Ms. Archana Varma have graciously permitted me to include some co-authored material (for chapters 1 and 6, respectively) in this book. My assistant, Jan Wright, prepared the manuscript with her usual skill, diligence, and good humor. To all these individuals, I offer my deepest gratitude.

Preface

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, held a rather dismal view of human nature. He declared that belief in human goodness was an evil illusion (1933, p. 104) and regarded vast swathes of humanity to be good for nothing in life (1905, p. 263), antisocial and anticultural (1927, p. 7) at their core, and fundamentally lazy and unintelligent (1927, p. 7). Freuds followers upheld this skeptical, if not cynical, view of man and looked at any positive traits with suspicion. They strenuously looked for the repudiated anguish or warded-off anxiety that, they believed, invariably lurked underneath sunny and enjoyable attributes of personality.

Over time, however, a shift occurred. British analysts (e.g., W. R. D. Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Michael Balint) who were not affiliated with either Anna Freud or Melanie Klein, challenged the notion of primary narcissism and replaced it with primary love. They accorded greater importance to object relations than to instinctual discharge. They regarded psychopathology to result not from the inherent battle between life and death instincts (and, between these instincts and the superego) but from impingement, abuse, overstimulation, or neglect by the childs early caretakers. The essentially romantic ethic of this perspective made it possible to discern goodness in human beings, which was intrinsic and natural, not merely defensive or sublimatory. Across the Atlantic, the work of Erik Erikson rendered it possible to see human development as providing, at each step of the way, personally gratifying outcomes of age-specific tasks and challenges. Ground was thus set for psychoanalytic psychology of mental health.

Sporadic papers now began to appear on specific healthy character traits as well. Prominent among these were Ralph Greensons (1962) paper on enthusiasm, Leo Rangells (1963) paper on friendship, Martin Bergmans (1971) paper on love, Warren Polands (1971) paper on tact, Chasseguet-Smirgels (1988) paper on humor, to name a few. I myself contributed to this trend by writing the first psychoanalytic essay fully devoted to the issue of forgiveness (Akhtar, 2002). A major step in the beginning consolidation of psychoanalytic interest in healthy, adaptive, and genuinely pleasurable aspects of human experience was taken in 2009 when the IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association) commissioned a comprehensive edited volume on these emotions and ego capacities (Akhtar, 2009a). There, I brought together the scattered psychoanalytic literature and invited updates and critiques from distinguished psychoanalysts around the world. I thought my work was done and I could put the issue to rest.

That did not turn out to be the case. Emotions and behaviors not included in that volume (e.g., generosity, gratitude, sacrifice) kept tugging at the sleeve of my psychoanalytic attention. Other topics (e.g., resilience, forgiveness, and courage), though addressed in the IPA volume, demanded further explication. As a result, I decided to write this book. I have divided the books contents in two parts: Part I addresses Positive Attributes and Part II, Positive Actions. The former contains chapters on Courage, Resilience, and Gratitude. The latter contains chapters on Generosity, Forgiveness, and Sacrifice. Together, the six chapters constitute a harmonious gestalt of the relational scenarios that assure enrichment of human experience. Allow me, at this point, to offer thumbnail sketches of each of these chapters.

I begin the first chapter of the book by considering the etymology and definition of the word courage and by elucidating the relationship of courage to power, wisdom, faith, joy, and self-affirmation. I make a brief foray into the phenomena of counterphobia and cowardice and then proceed to the developmental origins of courage as a character trait. I then devote a somewhat larger section to the technical implications of the aforementioned ideas and conclude by making some synthesizing remarks and by touching upon areas that might still have remained unaddressed.