How does culture affect child-rearing practices? How do factors such as poverty, ethnic difference, racial minority status, and having immigrant parents alter the experience of a growing child? Are there culturally distinct sub-groups within the African-American population? How ubiquitous are psychoanalytically derived schedules of personality development? In what form and to what extent are transference and countertransference affected by such racial, ethnic, and economic issues? In this volume, eight distinguished psychoanalysts (including some belonging to ethnic and racial minorities) attempt to answer these questions. They provide illuminating details of child-rearing practices in African-American, Indian, and Japanese families. They interweave mythological legacies, historical background, ethnographic data, and clinical observations into a rich tapestry of knowledge, empathy, and understanding. They try to tease out the variables of socioeconomic class from the issue of race and the ambiguities consequent upon raising children in a new and unfamiliar land from the ordinary and inevitable conflicts between generations.

The Colors of Childhood: Separation-Individuation across Cultural, Racial, and Ethnic Diversity (Margaret S. Mahler)

Kramer, Selma

Akhtar professor of psychiatry, Salman

Parenting & Relationships

Jason Aronson, Inc.

Can hope be pathological? What is love? How are envy and arrogance related to hatred? What is the optimal distance between the self and others? Why are some individuals excessively vulnerable to nostalgia? What are the distinctions between a need and a wish? Such questions frequently arise as one encounters individuals whose difficulties originate from an area between psychotic and neurotic organizations and yet who are not overtly borderline. These patients seem to be living between conflict and fragmentation. Working with them. poses many technical challenges. How does one meet their ego needs without gratifying their regressive wishes? Do affirmative interventions work better than interpretive ones when the patient is in deep emotional turmoil? What is the role of the patient's nonverbal communications? What are developmental interventions? How does one manage the countertransference risks inherent in treating such patients? Integrating diverse psychoanalytic traditions with his own theoretical and, clinical insights, Salman Akhtar provides answers to these and other important questions in this realm. He weaves the existing conceptual schisms and technical diversity into an integrated theory and technique. In a truly original contribution, he delineates certain ubiquitous human fantasies (e.g., "someday" and "if only" fantasies of optimism and nostalgia, and fantasies of powerful psychic tethers that bind us to others) and shows how their pathological variants underlie the suffering of these patients. Akhtar's book is full of poignant clinical vignettes that clearly illustrate his technical interventions.

Inner Torment: Living Between Conflict and Fragmentation

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Sibling relationships and rivalry are as old as recorded history. This analysis explores that ambivalence between siblings casts its shadow throughout people's lifetimes and affects their choices of mates, relationships with their own children, and aversions to others.

Brothers and Sisters: Developmental, Dynamic, and Technical Aspects of the Sibling Relationship (Margaret S. Mahler)

Why do people migrate from one country to another? What is the difference between an immigrant and an exile? What determines the psychological outcome of immigration? Can one ever mourn the loss of one's country? What are the defensive functions of nostalgia? Are there specific guidelines for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for immigrant patients? How can the therapist disentangle the patient's cultural rationalizations from underlying intrapsychic conflicts? In this unique book, psychoanalyst and poet Salman Akhtar provides answers to such questions. He notes that migration from one country to another has lasting effects on an individual's identity. Such identity change involves the dimensions of drives and affects, psychic space, temporality, and social affiliation. Dr. Akhtar addresses the immigrant's idealization and devaluation, closeness and distance, hope and nostalgia, transitional area of the mind, superego change, and linguistic transformation. With poignant clinical vignettes, he illustrates the implications of these ideas for the therapeutic process where the therapist, the patient, or both, are immigrants. Immigration and Identity, replete with poetry and personal letters from immigrant colleagues from many nations, conveys its message with irony, wit, laughter, pain, sadness, empathy, and, above all, clinical and human wisdom.

Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation

Thicker Than Blood addresses in depth the impact of adoption on biological parents, adoptive parents, adopted children, and siblings.

Thicker Than Blood: Bonds of Fantasy and Reality in Adoption (Margaret S. Mahler)

New Clinical Realms, Dr. Akhtar's latest book, raises intriguing questions about man's subjective experience and his relationship with the world around him. What exactly is mental pain? How does forgiveness occur? What is the proper psychosocial role of a mentor? And, even more provocatively, what is man's inner relationship with animals? How do inanimate objects sustain and facilitate psychic development throughout the life span? Do the physical objects in the clinical setting actually affect the patient's mind? How does simplicity lead to contradiction and at what stage does contradiction yield to paradox? With the help of illuminating clinical vignettes and a solid anchor in the contemporary diversity of psychoanalytic theorizing, Akhtar's book offers clinicians a rare glimpse into both the dark corners of psychopathology and the fresh arenas of healthy mental functioning. As a result, the readers find their capacity for empathy deepened and their therapeutic skills sharpened.A Jason Aronson Book

New Clinical Realms: Pushing the Envelope of Theory and Technique

What constitutes a lie? What are the different types of lies? Why do people lie? Is dishonesty ubiquitous in human experience? And what should be done with individuals who seek pschotherapeutic help and yet can not reveal important aspects of their lives and even fabricate histories, associations, and dreams? Such questions form the backbone of this exceptional book. Starting with the emergence of the capacity to lie in childhood and the formative influence of the family in children's moral development, the discourse goes on to include the variety of adulthood lies, including social lies, existential lies, pathological lies, narcissistic lies, and sociopathic lies. Contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts like Salman Akhtar, Harold Blum, Ruth Fischer, Lucy LaFarge, Henri Parens, and Michael Stone, along with others, explore the impact of dishonesty on the internal and external realities of an individual. Malignant forms of lies involving serious character pathology and criminality, as well as their detection, are also discussed. The book's aim is to help therapists enhance their empathy with patients who are compelled to lie and to provide them with better therapeutic strategies to deal with the clinical dilemmas that arise in working with such children and adults.

Lying, Cheating, and Carrying On: Developmental, Clinical, and Sociocultural Aspects of Dishonesty and Deceit (Margaret S. Mahler)

Parens MD professor of Psychiat, Henri

This book aims to help therapists enhance their empathy with patients who are compelled to lie and to provide them with better therapeutic strategies to deal with the clinical dilemmas that arise in working with such children and adults.

Teen & Young Adult

The Damaged Core: Origins, Dynamics, Manifestations, and Treatment

This comprehensive and tightly argued book deals with the process through which a coherent self evolves, the various ways such development fails to occur, and the therapeutic measures to put things back together. Beginning with the child's early relationships and their internalization as the substrate of the self, the text moves on to psychodynamically sophisticated and developmentally anchored descriptions of certain psychopathological syndromes that are widespread and yet inoptimally discussed. Going from the most severe to the least severe conditions in this realm, the book deals with the psychotic core, the schizoid wish to die and be reborn, the fantasies related to unresolved separation-individuation, the sociopathic tendency to lie, and the impact of excessive narcissism on love relations. The book also provides a unique perspective on the treatment of these conditions in so far as it not only elucidates the ways that a therapist listens and talks to his patients but also the subtle but deep impact of his ongoing attitude toward psychotherapeutic work. Even the role the therapist's office silently plays in the conduct of his work is discussed in detail. The book is theoretically sound and contemporary. More importantly, it is clinically generous and provides a number of vignettes to illustrate the ideas proposed. The writing style is a refreshing admixture of scientific scrupulosity, literary elegance, and humane relatedness.

Psychology & Counseling

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Akhtar professor of psychiatry, Salman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Akhtar professor of psychiatry, Salman

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Akhtar professor of psychiatry, Salman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Colors of Childhood: Separation-Individuation across Cultural, Racial, and Ethnic Diversity (Margaret S. Mahler)

Inner Torment: Living Between Conflict and Fragmentation

Brothers and Sisters: Developmental, Dynamic, and Technical Aspects of the Sibling Relationship (Margaret S. Mahler)

Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation

Thicker Than Blood: Bonds of Fantasy and Reality in Adoption (Margaret S. Mahler)

New Clinical Realms: Pushing the Envelope of Theory and Technique

Lying, Cheating, and Carrying On: Developmental, Clinical, and Sociocultural Aspects of Dishonesty and Deceit (Margaret S. Mahler)

Lying, Cheating, and Carrying On: Developmental, Clinical, and Sociocultural Aspects of Dishonesty and Deceit (Margaret S. Mahler)

The Damaged Core: Origins, Dynamics, Manifestations, and Treatment

The Damaged Core: Origins, Dynamics, Manifestations, and Treatment