Is psychoanalysis a cheerless (Freud-less) profession? Toward a psychoanalysis of joy

Joy can be understood as a basic form of resonance. Psychodynamically, joy is complementary to the feeling of anxiety. Whereas anxiety reflects psychic distress in connection with problems of structuring, joy is the expression of successful (re)structuring. It is the feeling of self-discovery, of a new beginning, and of self-renewal. 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.