You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is hard to overestimate the contributions that Salman Akhtar has made to our understanding of cultural factors in personality. Starting with his groundbreaking 1995 paper, “A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity, and the Psychoanalytic Process,” Akhtar has been steadfast in trying to show the psychoanalytic world that culture and history matter, and in particular the ways in which cultural transformations impact the psyche. A major contributor to the rising sea of challenges to the white-is-normative assumption of North American psychoanalysis, Akhtar has produced a steady stream of books, both authored and edited, and journal
articles that address such topics as race, ethnicity, immigration, and acculturation. To say that Akhtar’s contributions are too numerous to list is in this case a substantial understatement. Suffice it to say that he has either authored or co-authored 77 books and has edited or co-edited 52 more, on a wide range of issues, including many devoted to the cultural issues mentioned.
In some ways this is Akhtar’s most ambitious book. For here, Akhtar’s ambitions extend far beyond the consulting room. His goal is to use psychoanalysis to help explain and remediate global cultural conflict in general, and terrorism in particular. Yet these matters are so complex and involve so many matters related to politics, economics, history, and geography that nothing near a consensus solution has been reached in any relevant field. Add to this mix a consideration of the unconscious forces at work—about which psychoanalysis offers no consensus—and it is difficult to imagine a coherent perspective. This is foretold in the book’s introduction, where Akhtar writes, “I uphold as my intellectual forebears in writing this book even more than Sigmund Freud and Erik Erickson, are Melanie Klein and Noam Chomsky” (xiv) As much as I join Akhtar in his appreciation of both Klein and Chomsky, it is important to recognize the challenge entailed in attempting to in