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I want to start with a confession: I am not a fan of a lot of psychoanalytic writing, including, for the sake of honesty and humility, much of my own. I have come to share some of the skeptical views about clinical writing in particular espoused by French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who wrote that when psychoanalysts attempt to use clinical data to support an argument “a clinical ‘detail’ is invoked, completely without context … to ‘authenticate’ a point, while in fact the element selected is entirely shot through with unformulated theoretical presuppositions” (Laplanche, 1976, p. 49). And yet I read analytic literature anyway, largely out of a desire to feel a connection to other colleagues wrestling as I do with the dilemmas of patient work and the big ideas that we psychoanalysts attempt to engage. And yes, I also write it, surely in part for catharsis, in part for a desire to be known by my readers, and in part to indulge in the pleasures I find in the authorial craft.
This is all by way of saying that whenever I find out about an opportunity to read about psychoanalysis in a way that does not comport to the usual standards of psychoanalytic writing, I find myself particularly interested to see what other forms of writing are possible in our field. For beyond Laplanche’s critique of clinical writing in particular, I often find that analytic writing more broadly is constrained by presuppositions about how psychoanalytic writing is to be structured. Perhaps some of this constraint comes from journal editors and publishing houses, but my sense is that much more if it comes from our own self-imposed limitations and fears of deviation from tradition. So when I found out that Salman Akhtar had written a new book entitled “In Short: Private Notes of a Psychoanalyst,” a pocket-sized meditation on Akhtar’s acquired analytic wisdom, I was most curious to immerse myself in his experiment. I have always admired Akhtar for writing with courage and clarity, specifically for