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Good Stuff is an unusual book, a short book in length, but an expansive survey wending its way through cultural, literary, historical and psychoanalytic perspectives. One of Akhtar's motivations is “to temper Freud's view that human beings are essentially ‘bad’ and whatever goodness they can muster is largely defensive” (p. xiv). He hopes that: “by elucidating the origins, dynamics, social pleasures, and clinical benefits of courage, resilience, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness and sacrifice, I will shed light on a corner of human experience that has been inadequately understood by psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals” (p. xv).
Akhtar's book consists of chapters on each of his good stuff concepts. He describes the content of his book as having two parts: the first part focuses on the positive attributes of courage, resilience and gratitude, while the second part focuses on what he calls positive actions, generosity, forgiveness and sacrifice. This book's mission has evidently been in Akhtar's mind for a long time. Those of us familiar with Akhtar's work will notice that some of the chapters in this book were previously published in psychoanalytic journals, although they appear here with more recent additions. The earliest paper I noted was on forgiveness, published in 2002 in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Akhtar, 2002). In 2009, he edited a book, Good Feelings: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Positive Emotions and Attitudes (Akhtar, 2009), and a year later he published a paper on happiness (Akhtar, 2010).
His motivation for Good Stuff, I gather, is to resolve for himself and for others aspects of the fundamental argument about the primary goodness and badness of human nature. To accomplish this, he brings a breadth of vision to the reader that has evolved after years of psychoanalytic scholarship and clinical work. Good Stuff is his effort to reach an intelligent balance between what he calls the classical and romantic views of human nature. The classi