Books by Salman Akhtar

This tightly edited volume opens a new vista in psychoanalysis by focusing upon positive and life-enhancing emotions and attitudes. The realms it covers include love, friendship, enthusiasm, courage, tact, resilience, and forgiveness, among others.

Despite its ubiquitous presence, fear has received little direct attention in psychoanalytic literature. This book aims to fill this lacuna. It explicates various intensities of fear, e.g. apprehension, dread, panic, and terror. It delineates the boundaries between fear and anxiety.

Betrayal underlies all psychic trauma, whether sexual abuse or profound neglect, violence or treachery, extramarital affair or embezzlement. The first part deals with developmental aspects and notes that while the experience of betrayal might be ubiquitous in childhood, its lack of recognition by the parents is what leads to fixation upon it.

In this compact and pithy book, psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar steps out of his consulting room to address certain matters of urgent global concern. These include migration across national borders, the current refugee crisis, ethno-racial prejudice, subjective distress of minorities, and, above all, the ominous shadow of terrorism.

Arrogance as a specific constellation of affect, fantasy, and behavior has received little attention in psychoanalysis.

Bringing together the experiences of mistrust, jealousy, lack of love, shamelessness, regret, and despair, this far-reaching book elucidates human sorrow in striking sociocultural and clinical details.

Radical departures from the set and familiar rules of technique often become necessary in the course of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis that include conducting a session outside the office, giving advice, and more. This book highlights their indications, risks, and their potential anchors in psychoanalytic theory of human relatedness.

This book focuses on the intrapsychic vicissitudes of what it means to be truly alive and how death accompanies us at each step of our life's journey. It shows that, psychologically-speaking, death is always present in life and life in death.

In this compact and pithy book, psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar steps out of his consulting room to address certain matters of urgent global concern. These include migration across national borders, the current refugee crisis, ethno-racial prejudice, subjective distress of minorities, and, above all, the forever-present ominous shadow of terrorism.

By elucidating the origins, dynamics, social pleasures, and clinical benefits of courage, resilience, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and sacrifice, Good Stuff sheds light on a corner of human experience that has remained inadequately understood by psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals.

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

Offers clinicians a glimpse into the dark corners of psychopathology and the arenas of healthy mental functioning.

Thicker Than Blood addresses in depth the impact of adoption on biological parents, adoptive parents, adopted children, and siblings.