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OVER MANY YEARS MY CHILD ANALYTIC WORK HAS PRESENTED ME with special difficulties and challenges in helping patients who manifested a diminished capacity for feeling good. This deficiency, the obstacles it posed to these patients' maturation and improvement, and my analytic efforts to help them with it led me to investigate the nature of feeling good, what promotes and impedes its development, and how it relates to other aspects of the personality makeup. I further endeavored to understand these clinical phenomena theoretically and to develop technical means of working with patients who cannot feel good.
Feeling good is hard to describe and to define, but is readily recognized. It is characterized by pleasure in living, is often accompanied by a heightened sense of bodily and mental well-being, by an ability to extend oneself to others and to initiate and enjoy harmonious interactions with them, by an ease and comfort in giving to and taking from life what it has to offer, and by being creative in thought, word, or deed, however humble a form it may take. Feeling good is usually experienced in more