A PSYCHOLOGY OF NOTHINGNESS

Kraft tries to demonstrate how ""depression and anxiety can be joyful,"" as he analyzes in turn the joys of loneliness, aloneness, guilt, frustration, anger, boredom, apathy and anguish -- different ways of experiencing what he refers to as ""nothingness."" Feeling good about feeling bad -- like so many other of the popular home remedy schools of psychology -- is a whole lot faster and cheaper than years of old-fashioned psychoanalysis, but more likely to compound serious problems than to solve them. The author acknowledges a special debt to the writings of Martin Heidegger, but the resemblance of this simplistic theory of personality adjustment to either phenomenology or existentialism is slight indeed.