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Salman Akhtar is one of our most prolific authors and one of our best. Scholarly without obfuscating, he engages with ease, writing with fluency, clarity, detail and nuance. In this book he takes on no less than the vast expanse of life and death in psychoanalytic thought. Building upon Freud's late instinct theory, he manages to encompass within that domain a working assumption of differing but overlapping psychoanalytic perspectives - structural, ego psychological, object relational, developmental, self psychological, gendered, and relational. He provides clinical vignettes and offers comments on technique. To support his aim of furthering psychoanalytic perceptiveness, he alludes to and quotes from such diverse authorities as Freud, Klein, Anna Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Hartmann, Erikson, Loewald, Stone, Green, Schafer, and Kernberg, among others - implicitly taking cognizance of partisanships within the discipline yet eluding any prospects of narrowness. In brief, he communicates not only the vibrancy, intrigue, challenges, complexities and, for some, quarrels of our discipline but its continuing illumination of the human condition and usefulness to it.
Matters of Life and Death addresses psychosocial, moral, philosophical and, to some degree, religious aspects of subjective experience: what sustains a sense of a life worth living and what, dynamically, affects or frustrates that sense of well-being. At the beginning Akhtar states his intention to focus 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” (p. xiii). He goes on:
Freud's life and death instincts are my guides. Loyal to his declaration that all living experience results from the opposition or combination of these two “basic instincts”, I will attempt to show that, psychologically speaking, death is always present in life and life in death. Dehumanization of living human beings and immortal renown of the dead are my diverge