Wound of Mortality

Salman Akhtar is professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.

This anthology is edited by Salman Akhtar, who is now well on his way to becoming the most prolific author in psychoanalytic history. Akhtar's sterling introduction, together with twelve subsequent essays by psychoanalysts, offers a vast examination of death, ranging from Freudian to post-Freudian commentary, from the theoretical to the clinical, from the cultural to the intrapsychic, from the transferential to the countertransferential, and from the developmental to the defensive. Recalling E.M. Forster's remark that physical death destroys us whereas the thought of death may save us, readers of this book might also experience the wound of mortality as losing some of its sting.

• Chapter 1. Freud's Todesangst and Ghalib's Ishrat-e-Qatra: Two Perspectives on DeathChapter 2. What Happens When You Die: Three to Four Year Olds Chatting About DeathChapter 3. Children's Understanding of DeathChapter 4. Symbolic Death: East and WestChapter 5. It Is Not Over When It's Over: Reflections on Death and MourningChapter 6. Fear of Death: Analyst and Patient in the Same BoatChapter 7. The Dead Self Must Be RebornChapter 8. Living to Die and Dying to Live: Normal and Pathological Considerations of Death AnxietyChapter 9. Facing Death: Intrapsychic Conflict and Intergenerational PassageChapter 10. Eastern Intersubjectivity: Relational Homes for Frailty and DeathChapter 11. Demise and IllusionChapter 12. Is That All There Is?: A Concluding Commentary on Psychoanalysis and Death