Description: Ever since Freud proposed that certain ideas can be permitted to become conscious only in their inverted and negative forms, interest has grown into the entire realm of the presence of absence, so to speak. This book provides contemporary perspectives on the developmental underpinnings of negation and the technical usefulness of the concept.
Brief description: Salman Akhtar 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. He has authored, edited or co-edited more than 300 publications including books on psychiatry and psychoanalysis and several collections of poetry. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia. Salman Akhtar received the Sigourney Award in 2012.
Review Quotes: "Freud's paper 'Negation' was published in 1925 amid the creative ferment produced by his introduction of a new paradigm for psychoanalysis, but because of its brevity and position among Freud's major writings, it has often been overlooked or underappreciated. Now, however, thanks to this volume of essays by a distinguished international group of leading contemporary psychoanalytic scholars, it should assume its rightful place, not only as a contribution to analytic technique, but as an important preliminary step in Freud's conceptualization of the creation and maintenance of reality sense and a foundational essay in the development of his theory of thinking."--Howard Levine, MD, training and supervising analyst