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The conventionally defined goal and process in psychoanalysis are expressed by Storr (1989): together they form “the act of alleviating personal difficulties through the agency of a personal, professional relationship” (p. 12). But is this enough? Might we, borrowing from our literary cousins, aim for more: for finding fluidity and evanescence of life as sensed by certain lyric poets; for a capacity for verve, buoyancy, passion, earthiness, vitality, delight, and a sense that, at one's best moments, life hums? Hammer (1990) writes:
Thoreau refers to this as “to be alive, to the extremities.” Joyce Carol Oates calls it “to live one's life passionately.” Edith Wharton terms it a “life-lover, life-wonderer and emotional adventurer.” Shelley puts it more expansively: “boundless, as we wish our souls to be.” H. L. Mencken expresses it as attaining the state where “the good red sun does not send one scurrying.” And Milan Kundera, lyrically, albeit ambivalently, calls it the “unbearable lightness of being.” (p. 27)
With this openness to life also goes a playful interest in things that may ignite one's flickering capacity for creativity and for innovation.
Now, to Freud's bipartite wisdom for a satisfying and full life, the capacity for work and for love, Joel Shor adds play. Is the above conception from the creative writers similar to what Shor means? And vice versa?
As to the form of Shor's book, we find it hard to locate the flavoring of play in the work, which is heavy, written in a dry, dawdling, meandering, excruciatingly obsessive style. One yearns for a felicitous phrase here and there to lend some rhetorical lift. If ever a book needed to illustrate that lightness of tone and seriousness of purpose could be wed, it is this one. But Shor cannot often rise to the occasion. He is bogged down with the book's stylistic weight — preachy, constricted, airless — and the reader, now and then, sinks with him. But it is only now and then.
At other times, Shor does achieve some mov