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In Feelings, Willard Gaylin has written a book which has both popular appeal as well as something to say to practicing psychoanalysts. He achieves this feat in two ways: through his beautiful simple style in which he makes sophisticated and subtle ideas clear and understandable and by establishing himself as such a decent person that one is charitably disposed to see the wisdom in his observations. What is not always clear, however, is his purpose for writing the book. Although Gaylin is a psychoanalyst, the book does not seem to have been written for psychoanalysts. He confuses psychoanalysis and psychiatry, something that is presumably irksome to most people in both professions, although perhaps this one lapse in his gentility stems from his own membership in both professions. There is a striking absence of case material; all examples are either literary or autobiographical.
His primary concern is with feelings which he says can only be understood anecdotally. Gaylin is more than just a good story teller. He finds feelings in an astonishingly wide range of literature and is as comfortable quoting his daughter as he is Virginia Woolf or Herodotus. But the purpose of the book does not seem to be to suggest new applications of psychoanalysis to literature or to familial reminiscences, however well he demonstrates the technique. Rather, although he does not say this himself, he seems to have written this book to develop the idea that all feelings are important and that every individual should, if possible, accept his or her feelings without acting on them. Gaylin juxtaposes the primacy of feelings to the more conventional psychoanalytic emphasis on insight, thoughts and ideas which he says have ‘ironically’ dominated psychoanalytic thinking.
Gaylin interprets Freud as a philosophical idealist and a spokesman for a kind of subjectivity bordering on solipsism: “No one, he [Freud] announced, lives in the real world. We occupy a space of our own creation—a collage compounde