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Acclaimed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar has edited The African American Experience: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (first published in 2012 by Jason Aronson), and its contribution to the literature about the descendants of mostly Central and Western African tribes who were delivered, as slaves, to the United States of America cannot be exaggerated. This book represents a singular collection of scholarly voices united in presenting their multiple viewpoints on the development and knowledge of, and (heretofore) familiarity with aspects of the summative experiences of African Americans. As Akhtar concedes in his introduction, the book is an attempt both to upend established assumptions about “the history, the struggles, and the accomplishments of our fellow citizens who constitute twelve percent of the current population of the United States of America” and to offer accounts of resilience by African Americans when confronted with the transgenerational transmission of trauma from discrimination, prejudice, racism, and over 400 years of legal disenfranchisement.
Akhtar places each chapter into four subdivisions: (1) a chronology of African American life in the United States and an account both of pioneers and of contemporary contributors to psychoanalysis; (2) an analysis of the lives and experiences of five prominent figures from the last 60 years; (3) a broad spectrum look at the conception and development of African American identities; and (4) five chapters dedicated to psychoanalytically informed therapy with African Americans, analytic training of African Americans, and transference and countertransference themes involving race and ethnicity from the treatment room. He is successful, by and large, in assembling the various components of life experience, of personality development, and of self/other relationships into a coherent, psychoanalytic perspective on what it is to be an American descendant of the centuries-long enslavement of Africans.
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