In Short

Salman Akhtar, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.  He has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. His more than 400 publications include 105 books, of which the following 22 are solo-authored: Broken Structures (1992), Quest for Answers (1995), Inner Torment (1999), Immigration and Identity (1999), New Clinical Realms (2003), Objects of Our Desire (2005), Regarding Others (2007), Turning Points in Dynamic Psychotherapy (2009), The Damaged Core (2009), Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009), Immigration and Acculturation (2011), Matters of Life and Death (2011), The Book of Emotions (2012), Psychoanalytic Listening (2013), Good Stuff (2013), Sources of Suffering (2014), No Holds Barred (2016), A Web of Sorrow (2017), Mind, Culture, and Global Unrest (2018), Silent Virtues (2019), Tales of Transformation (2021), and In Leaps and Bounds (2022).  Dr Akhtar has delivered many prestigious invited lectures including a Plenary Address at the 2nd International Congress of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders in Oslo, Norway (1991), an Invited Plenary Paper at the 2nd International Margaret S. Mahler Symposium in Cologne, Germany (1993), an Invited Plenary Paper at the Rencontre Franco-Americaine de Psychanalyse meeting in Paris, France (1994), a Keynote Address at the 43rd IPA Congress in Rio de Janiero, Brazil (2005), the Plenary Address at the 150th Freud Birthday Celebration sponsored by the Dutch Psychoanalytic Society and the Embassy of Austria in Leiden, Holland (2006), the Inaugural Address at the first IPA-Asia Congress in Beijing, China (2010), and the Plenary Address at the Fall Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2017.  Dr Akhtar is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Edith Sabshin Award (2000), Columbia University’s Robert Liebert Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychoanalysis (2004), the American Psychiatric Association’s Kun Po Soo Award (2004) and Irma Bland Award for being the Outstanding Teacher of Psychiatric Residents in the country (2005). He received the highly prestigious Sigourney Award (2012) for distinguished contributions to psychoanalysis. In 2103, he gave the Commencement Address at graduation ceremonies of the Smith College School of Social Work in Northampton, MA.  Dr Akhtar’s books have been translated in many languages, including German, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish.  A true Renaissance man, Dr Akhtar has served as the Film Review Editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and is currently serving as the Book Review Editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He has published 11 collections of poetry and serves as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia.  

Contents



Introduction



Part I

Preparation

1. Reading Freud

2. Three ‘must read’ papers by Ferenczi

3. Children, animals, and poetry

4. Alternate professions

5. Life style requirements

6. Silent sacrifices

7. Seeking diverse supervision

8. Setting up an office

9. A mysterious rug

10. Entering a world of ambiguity

11. Reading, reading and reading

12. Borrowed faith



Part II

Principles

13. Mental health vs. mental illness

14. A mentally healthy person

15. Half-sane, half-insane

16. Happy and unhappy children

17. Peek-a-boo

18. Hunger, vision, and the rhythms of nature

19. Learning from children

20. The non-human envelope

21. Toy shops are not for kids

22. Spirituality vs. religion

23. Sex–aggression–sex

24. Metapsychology

25. Two major updates on metapsychology

26. ‘Bad’ death instinct, ‘good’ death instinct

27. Six misunderstandings about death in psychoanalysis

28. Three reactions to separation

29. Two griefs that last a lifetime

30. What happens to the deceased’s possessions?

31. A crowded preconscious

32. Receiving vs. taking

33. Reaction formation and undoing

34. Even Unabomber …

35. Double-bind

36. The unknown, the unmet, and the unlived

37. Where does an aborted childhood go?

38. Being emotional vs. being sentimental

39. Feeling ‘at home’

40. Who should change?

41. Toxic nobility

42. Basic trust, earned trust, and mutual trust

43. Good enough revenge

44. Where the ego was …

45. Two ‘great crimes’

46. Detachment theory



Part III

Practice

47. Who picks the day and time for the first appointment

48. Abstinence

49. Safeguarding the sacred nature of the clinical space

50. Restroom

51. Where is Rome?

52. Hearing is essential for listening

53. Floating couch

54. Does the analyst’s gender matter?

55. No ‘correct’ way of laying on the couch

56. Handling patients’ questions

57. Doodling etc.

58. Addressing the analyst by his/her professional title

59. Not asking about actual sex

60. Before and after

61. About defecation and feces

62. Diminishing frequency of sessions

63. Chronic lateness

64. The use of a deliberately wrong interpretation

65. Small gifts given by immigrant patients

66. Refusing to listen to certain kinds of material

67. Being special

68. Pleasure and mental illness

69. ‘Insane chemistry’

70. Demystification

71. Imaginary interlocutors

72. When not to give the bill to a patient?

73. Humility

74. Which form of racism is worse?

75. Masochistic funnel

76. The novelist and the poet

77. Analyst’s boredom

78. Analyst’s financial status

79. Where does the analyst look?

80. Insight addiction

81. Three different outcomes

82. Why not this at the end?

83. The fate of the analyst’s bills

84. Uttering an adult patient’s first name

85. Procrastination and nail biting

86. Stillness

87. Cats, not dogs

88. Countertransference sublimation

89. Financial extremes



Part IV

Profession

90. The second beard

91. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis

92. Do we need a prefix to ‘psychoanalysis’?

93. Jewish psychoanalysis, Christian psychoanalysis

94. Pauses

95. Writers and non-writers

96. Analysts’ memoirs

97. Was Bion Hindu?

98. PEP vetting

99. Age-specific writing

100. The ‘domestication’ of wild analysis

101. Childless child analysts

102. Three tips for supervisors

103. Non-analyst friends

104. The future of psychoanalysis

105. Blood killing

106. Un-associated and un-affiliated

107. The analyst’s funeral

108. Analysts turned gurus

109. Taboos

110. The analyst’s dog

111. Alternate pathways



Acknowledgments

About the author

Name index