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This new book by Graham Music, hot on the heels of his excellent Nuturing Natures (Music, 2010), is a very important and timely one. As is the case with all his writing, it is saturated with bang up-to-date research evidence with a reference list covering 40 pages. How Graham reads all this and what is more absorbs essential facts is quite extraordinary given he has a day job as well. The fact he makes these studies accessible to all of us is an act of altruism in itself.
Through focussing on the ‘Good Life’, defined by Aristotle as a life lived ethically and which feels good, which we now term well-being or flourishing, the book attempts to rebalance to some extent the perceived focus psychoanalytic theories tend to have on the negative and destructive tendencies although proper reading of someone like Melanie Klein shows this not to be the case. Her famous paper, ‘Envy and gratitude’ (Klein, 1957), is remembered more for its study of envy rather than her extensive writing about gratitude or generosity. This, to me, is one of the flaws of this book as Graham seems to largely ignore or, at most, to pay passing reference to psychoanalysis when many of the studies he is illustrating largely reinforce the psychoanalytic position. The importance of this book as a social and political statement about the diminution of altruism and the rise of selfishness and narcissism in Western society is most welcome. However, at a time when psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is under such attack in the same societies, psychoanalytic thinking could have been supported and strengthened if its main tenets were shown to be underpinned by the new research studies Graham so eloquently describes and explains. As such this book misses a serious political opportunity to stand up for the bedrock of our profession. I will illustrate this point later. This one misgiving should not put off the reader from devouring this book as it is full of richness and fascinating material.
Graham convincingly chal