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Salman Akhtar is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College. In addition to four other books in the realm of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, he has published six books of poetry, three in Urdu and three in English. He has edited twenty books on a wide variety of subjects, and this same breadth of interest makes him a much-sought-after lecturer as well. New Clinical Realms: Pushing the Envelope of Theory and Technique reflects both the depth of his psychoanalytic knowledge and the expansiveness of his attention.
This volume of ten chapters is a collection of papers on quite diverse topics that Akhtar considers to have been relatively neglected in our field. The table of contents reminds us of the individuality of his psychoanalytic vision, including as it does subjects like “mental pain,” “writer's block,” “the shy narcissist,” and “mentorship.” Chapters 2, 5, and 6 are new to this volume; the rest have been published before.
As with many such collections, this is not an integrated work, but a series of distinct essays, loosely woven together by the author's underlying perspectives. It ranges widely and reflects, as Akhtar says, the “tripartite paradigm composed of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and poetry [that] constitutes my voice” (p. xvi, his emphasis). And Akhtar has a compelling voice—that of a poet, a psychoanalytic scholar, and someone far from home.
Akhtar's writings have largely focused on the early developmental processes that drive and organize emotional life. He is interested in the crucial structural and motivational distinctions between needs and wishes, as well as their clinical and theoretical implications.1