Psychotherapy is undergoing a cultural rejuvenation. The cultural relativism of its developmental and structural postulates has been acknowledged. We are seeing more clearly how ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, religious and linguistic differences between therapists and patients can affect their dialogue in profound ways. Such recognition is welcome accompaniment to an emerging theoretical pluralism, as well as a response to the shifting population patterns throughout the world, and, more specifically the changing demographic make-up of the United States, which is becoming a truly multiethnic...

Can hope be pathological? What is love? How are envy and arrogance related to hatred? What is the optimal distance between the self and others? Why are some individuals excessively vulnerable to nostalgia? What are the distinctions between a need and a wish? Such questions frequently arise as one encounters individuals whose difficulties originate from an area between psychotic and neurotic organizations and yet who are not overtly borderline. These patients seem to be living between conflict and fragmentation. Working with them. poses many technical challenges. How does one meet their ego...

Sibling relationships and rivalry are as old as recorded history. This analysis explores that ambivalence between siblings casts its shadow throughout people's lifetimes and affects their choices of mates, relationships with their own children, and aversions to others.

Immigration from one country to another is a complex psychological process with significant and lasting effects on an individual's identity. Even under the best circumstances, immigration is a traumatic occurence; like other traumas, it mobilizes a mourning process. It also offers renewed opportunity for psychic growth and alteration, and the mourning-liberation process transforms the immigrant's identity. In this book, this progression is highlighted along the dimensions of drives and affects, interpersonal and psychic space, temporality, and social affiliation. As the topics of identity and...

This book integrates psychiatry and psychoanalysis to present deeper and sounder clinical profiles of the personality disorders than have been hitherto available.

Akhtar and Kramer (psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College) collect ten contributions that look at the joys, heartaches, benefits and problems of adoption. Drawing on broad clinical and personal experience, they focus on such critical topics as separation-individuation theory, the complexities of bond

At long last there is a book that brings the issue of religious belief into the consulting room. Deliberately avoiding the one debate about whether or not God exists, the editors have marshaled papers that take seriously the fact that patients are affected by their religious convictions. Experts on Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam refract the clinical process through the prisms of these religions, and commentaries on their papers are offered by distinguished psychoanalysts who provide vigorous challenges and supplementary visions. Therapists will be informed by reading this book and...

This book is about affect--its origins, development and uses--and how it is viewed in a clinical setting. The authors track and further develop the recent major changes in the understanding of affect. From its roots in childhood development to its cross-cultural aspects, affect remains clinically relevant in issues such as aggression and forgiveness.

New Clinical Realms, Dr. Akhtar's latest book, raises intriguing questions about man's subjective experience and his relationship with the world around him. What exactly is mental pain? How does forgiveness occur? What is the proper psychosocial role of a mentor? And, even more provocatively, what is man's inner relationship with animals? How do inanimate objects sustain and facilitate psychic development throughout the life span? Do the physical objects in the clinical setting actually affect the patient's mind? How does simplicity lead to contradiction and at what stage does contradiction...

Across the lifespan we may experience moments of sublime intimacy, suffocating closeness, comfortable solitude, and intolerable distance or closeness. In Interpersonal Boundaries: Variations and Violations Salman Akhtar and the other contributors demonstrate how boundaries, by delineating and containing the self, secure one's conscious and unconscious experience of entity and of self-governance. Interpersonal Boundaries reveals the complexities of the self and its boundaries, while identifying some of the enigmatic questions about how the biological, psychological, and cultural aspects of the...