The author's focus in this book is upon the intrapsychic vicissitudes of what it means to be truly alive and how death accompanies us at each step of our life's journey. He attempts to show that, psychologically-speaking, death is always present in life and life in death. He discovers what is emotionally central to being alive and how death and awareness of death -- conscious or unconscious -- silently color our subjective experience. The fundamental thrust of these socio-clinical meditations is to enhance appreciation of aspects of life that have been inoptimally addressed in psychoanalytic literature and to expand the view of death in ways that might be personally and technically enriching. About the author: Salman Akhtar, MD, was born in India and completed his medical and psychiatric education there. Upon arriving in the USA in 1973, he repeated his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and then obtained psychoanalytic training from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. His more than 300 publications include nine books: Broken Structures; Quest for Answers; Inner Torment; Immigration and Identity; New Clinical Realms; Objects of Our Desire; Regarding Others; Turning Points in Dynamic Psychotherapy; and The Damaged Core, as well as twenty-six edited or co-edited volumes in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and six collections of poetry. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. |