Publisher's Synopsis
The uniqueness of this Comprehensive Reference Dictionary is that, even though there are many professionals practicing psychoanalysis as well as publishing books and articles in the field, this work is based exclusively on the 24 primary texts of the recognized founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, M.D. Several dictionaries of relevance to psychoanalysis as a field of research and practice presently populate the market and though the quality of these efforts vary from excellent to acceptable, they all draw from a variety of sources, practitioners, researchers, and scholars but none limit themselves to a delineation of terms and concepts employed exclusively in the collected works of Freud himself. This definition is dedicated solely to a delineation of the terms and concepts developed and employed by Freud himself and used in his published works. That these terms and concepts became common nomenclature by subsequent generations of practitioners is of no relevance to our efforts here.Given the magnitude of this undertaking in creating an encyclopedic dictionary for practitioners in the broad field of psychoanalysis, I am determined to lay out a rational and logical fashion the methodology I have employed in gathering and sorting the materials included in this work. By doing so, I hope both to demonstrate the fundamental comprehensiveness of my approach and to validate the integrity I attempt to embody in this undertaking. This reference dictionary aspires to be a great resource for scholars, students, and practitioners of psychoanalysis who desire to have in one location a comprehensive delineation of every term and concept developed by Freud himself appearing in his published works. Every term and concept employed by Freud in any of his 24 volumes in his Collected Works is listed including the volume or volumes in which they appear and the page number for their exact location for referencing by the user of this dictionary.For 20 years I taught a doctoral-level seminar in the international summer program of Oxford University and have held a professorial appointment in research psychopathology specializing in the classical and modern schools of psychotherapy with special emphasis on the psychopathology of personality disorders. Presently, I am Editor-in-Chief of a scholarly journal in this field, The Behavioral Mind: A Journal in Personality Disorders, which fosters a balance between the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and humanistic psychology embodied in the work of the Third Force led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others. In the development of this major reference work based on the Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, I have taken my inspiration from the creators of the great dictionaries of the English language, particular Dr. Samuel Johnson's essay on lexicography prefacing his landmark epic in commencing the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (August, 1747, titled "Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language"), and that of the creators of the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language (launched May, 1860).In 1950, Nandor Fodor and Frank Gaynor, with a Preface by Theodor Reik, produced the first dictionary of psychoanalytic terms which were gleaned from over 60 primary source materials written by Freud himself. Though a monumental undertaking and an early key reference source for psychoanalysts, the book, titled, Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (N.Y.: The Philosophical Library, Inc., 1950), had some disappointing shortcomings in that it often defined the terms by only reference the book title from which it was selected but without a page reference. When bibliographic referencing was attempted, it never provided more than the chapter in which the word being defined was to be found.
