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Salman Akhtar is a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist, a writer and a poet. In his latest book, A Web of Sorrow, he presents a study of the different emotional states that lead to sorrow. He begins by remarking that the use of the word ‘sorrow’ appears to have slipped from common parlance despite its ubiquitous presence in the world we live in. He links its disappearance from ordinary linguistic exchange to us living in an ‘era of specialisation’, and questions whether we now prefer to ‘speak only of components and catalysts of sorrow? Of loss of hope, of lack of love, of decline of fidelity, or of regret?’ (p. ). He concludes that if this is the case then we must deal with component scenarios like mistrust, jealousy, lovelessness, hopelessness, shamelessness and regret, to attend to the sadness that underlies these emotional states. This, he feels, will bring us back to talking about sorrow itself.
Akhtar devotes a chapter to each of these six component scenarios. He discusses these emotional states by tracing their developmental origins within the context of psychoanalytic literature, interweaving pertinent insights from general psychology, psychiatry and cultural anthropology. From time to time he offers some clinical examples from his own practice, and draws upon his wide knowledge of films and poetry to further elucidate these topics. He also presents the technical implications of working therapeutically with patients whose mental lives are suffused with these sorts of feelings.
The book is divided into two parts: in Part I, Akhtar describes how sorrow can be felt in response to events that have their origins external to the self, i.e. as a result of painful experiences encountered in social, cultural and also in the clinical realms of life. In this section he discusses mistrust, jealousy and lovelessness. In Part II, Akhtar attends to sorrow arising from within the self and in response to feelings of shamelessness, regret and hopelessness. On a phenomenological an