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Halo in the Sky is ambitions and therefore difficult. It was written in defense of drive theory, a cause that could not find a more persuasive defender than Shengold, who by means of examples from literature and clinical practice proves the viability of this approach. He demonstrates persuasively that consistent attention to anal drive derivatives emerging from the analytic situation or a literary text reveals them to be defenses against the expression of affect. According to Shengold, regression to anality is a defense against oedipal strivings that serves to master intolerable affects and to simplify and caricature problems. Nothing in this work seems either arbitrary or subjective, but it describes an approach that is temporarily out of style. Reading the book, however, makes amply clear that the loss is ours.
Unlike Shakespeare, who claimed that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Shengold asserts that man's creative imagination, when used in the service of defense, can deodorize the anal orifice, idealize it, and imagine it to be a halo in the sky. He calls it anal defensiveness, which, like all