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Over the course of many years of engaging in psychoanalysis with a wide range of individuals, a striking aspect of this process has become increasingly figural for me. Among those patients who have manifested the most significant growth and transformation in their treatment, I have observed a dramatic enhancement in their capacity for vitality and pleasure in diverse areas of their lives. Concomitantly, I have experienced an evolving vitalization and capacity for mutual affirmation and mutual pleasure, specifically within the ongoing treatment relationship itself.
A large corpus of clinical reports in the psychoanalytic literature, as well as accumulated clinical lore passed on from teachers to students, supervisors to supervisees, confirms this experience as consensually validated and pervasive. The virtue of enhancing the capacity for vitality and pleasure was implied in Freud's famous dictum that the goal of human life, and of psychoanalysis itself, is “to love and work” as fully as possible; it was similarly implied in Kohut's (1977) assertion that “the positive achievement of a good analysis will … be confirmed by the fact that the patient is now able to experience the joy of existence more keenly” (p. 285).
Freud's early postulation of the “pleasure principle” (1905) came to be understood by many psychoanalysts in a quasi-mechanistic, physiologically determined manner that reduced all pleasure seeking to instinctually rooted sensual pleasure in accord with a drive-defense model (Klein, 1976; Mitchell, 1988). In recent years, however, a number of theorists have examined