ABSTRACT
Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is where Positive Psychoanalysis comes together. The study and quantification of SWB comprises a vast area of Positive Psychology research and practice that is virtually unknown in the psychoanalytic literature. If I were to speculate on the reasons for this surprising absence, I come up with a number of possibilities. One is its very location in the domain of positive psychology: Analysts and psychotherapists spend most of their time in the realm of negative psychology, thinking about and trying to ameliorate that negative (an entirely honorable endeavor, I would immediately stress). Another is that researchers in the field insist on developing scales to precisely measure well-being, and this is a pursuit that is foreign to much of what we do, if not what we like to say we do (again there are quite good reasons for this). Finally, SWB is most immediately concerned with conscious mental processes and, as psychoanalysts, we tend to privilege the unconscious (for this, there is little justification).
