The Psychoanalytic quarterly
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This paper continues a line of investigation begun in a previous paper on nested dreams and works of art in dreams (Balter 2005). Part I of the present paper seeks to establish that works of art with nested dreams and works of art within them display certain phenomena also observed in comparable dreams: (i) they unsuccessfully deny a painful reality represented in the nested element; (2) they present an antithetical view of that reality (both denying and affirming); and (3) they are consistently associated with the problem of reality (the problem of deciding what is real or true). Part II of this paper seeks to establish the heuristic value of this line of investigation in dreams and art to elucidate the origin of reality testing.
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Joy can be understood as a basic form of resonance. Psychodynamically, joy is complementary to the feeling of anxiety. ⋯ In stark contrast, there are numerous empirically supported indications that there is little evidence of feelings of joy in the psychoanalytic literature. Why is this the case? Pursuing his analysis of this apparent but unspoken taboo against joy in professional analytic writing, the author outlines a psychoanalysis of joy in the hope that it will encourage analysts to be more aware and expressly affirmative of joy as it occurs in their work.