best book on psychoanalytic concepts
I have been waiting for a book like this for decades. Being a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, myself, it always seemed to me there should be an encyclopaedic dictionary that everyone could read.
Dr. Akhtar has accomplished the almost-impossible: he has put, in one book, clear, referenced, and fun-to-read descriptions of every major psychoanalytic theory and every major psychoanalytic author. Want to know about Freud? Melanie Klein? Peter Fonagy? Jacques Lacan? Otto Kernberg vs Kohut? Mahler vs Ainsworth? It's all there, and more. How about Jerome Winer's work on Managing the Asymmetry in the therapeutic relationship? Or Harold Blum's explication of color in dreams, erotic transference, female sexuality, and paranoia? They are there, too.
There are interesting references to Vamik Volkan's psychoanalytic work on international relations, multiple references to Charles Brenner's revisions of Freud, and Roiphe and Galenson's work on female childhood development, to name a few of the modern psychoanalytic scholars whose work is explained.
Dr. Akhtar, of course, is a highly published author, himself, having made significant contributions in the areas of severe personality disorders, defensive operations, and the effects of immigration and culture, as well as many others. With this new volume, he has written a remarkably unbiased, inclusive work, transparently including his own opinions about what is valuable and what is not, with further references for the interested reader included in the text (no searching around the bibliography).
On the other hand, the bibliography is immense, and very well designed, so that it is easy to find any author and that author's contributions.
This book gives the analytic fellow, trainee in mental health, college student, and the average educated person, a reference that can be used for ACCURATE description of psychoanalytic terms and the ways these terms have been and are currently used. It is user-friendly, with terms in simple alphabetical order, and wonderfully free of disclaimers and euphemisms.
It is worth much more than the price being charged. It obviously took many years to write, and has been carefully arranged. The Comprehensive Dictionary is a veritable gem. Thank you, Dr. Ahktar!
