You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Perhaps the most widely read and well known authority on the virtuous life is Aristotle, who in the Nicomachean Ethics introduced the idea that virtue is related to characterological habits of excellence. Aristotle promulgates the notion of a rational person pursuing a virtuous life, and that
falling short of the golden mean of a particular virtue is caused by an excess or deficiency in habit or character.
Fast forward not quite twenty-four hundred years and we find psychoanalysts wrestling with the life of virtue, but now with a more certain knowledge that because of internal conflicts, unconscious forces, and shifting sociocultural influences or group dynamics we are not fully governed by a rational disposition. From the perspective of a philosopher turned clinician, Jonathan Lear has written beautifully about the life of virtue in our time and its similarity and difference vis-à-vis Aristotle's account (Lear 1998, 2000). Now Salman Akhtar, with his clinical wisdom, stylistic clarity, and appreciation of human development, considers the life of unconscious motivation and conflict and renders a clinical account of virtues he describes as positive attributes and actions. Those virtues are enumerated in the book's title: Good Stuff: Courage, Resilience, Gratitude, Generosity, Forgiveness, and Sacrifice. Where Aristotle asserted that the virtues are related to the pursuit of “happiness,” Akhtar frames the positive attributes and actions in terms of mental health and adaptation.
This highly readable book includes contemporary vignettes illustrating the expression, inhibition, or pathology of particular positive traits and practices and thus brings the psychoanalyst to a deeper consideration of the moral striving of humans and its relation to mental health. Akhtar succeeds in a discussion of moral attributes and actions in part because he largely achieves the golden mean of empathic understanding and insight about what impedes the establishment and exercise of adaptive