Book Review: In Leaps and Bounds: Psychic Development and its Facilitation in Treatment. By Salman Akhtar. London:  Karnac, 2022,  222 pp., $33.95 paperback.

Dr. Salman Akhtar has now been publishing psychoanalytic papers and books for 43 years. His recent text on psychological development, In Leaps and Bounds, demonstrates that he is still at the height of his creativity and productivity. It is the single best psychoanalytic text on development that I have ever read. It is comprehensive, lucid, readable, nuanced, and wise. I have already decided to use this text for our institute's Advanced Psychodynamic Psychotherapy program. I have also suggested it to my colleagues who oversee the curriculum for our institute's Analytic Training Program. Indeed, this book is written for psychoanalysts, though it is also appropriate for professionals who are not fluent in our literature's theoretical terminology and jargon.

The many facets of Dr. Akhtar's career as a psychoanalytic clinician, teacher, scholar, writer, and thinker are all evident in this book. This includes his exposure to multiple cultures as an immigrant to the United States from India and his vast experience as a general adult psychiatrist. When I was a psychiatric resident in Philadelphia during the late 1990s, I always looked forward to weekends when Dr. Akhtar was on call. His long, detailed, handwritten admission notes about seriously ill patients admitted to our inpatient unit read like finely crafted, literary, character-driven short stories. In his careful exposition as an expert diagnostician, I would learn about each patient's family of origin, cultural and religious heritage, parents, siblings, love and sex life, ambitions and fantasies, self-representations, professional and academic functioning, mental and medical vulnerabilities, and recent events which might have triggered a recent

psychotic episode or suicide attempt. N