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Having arrived late, I discovered that the meeting had begun and Salman Akhtar was reading his Introduction from the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.1 Surprised by the unusual experience of finding Salman reading instead of speaking extemporaneously, I used this as an introduction to my own remarks by observing to the audience that I was taken aback by the prospect of not having a written paper. This “role reversal” created a sense of unease in me because the world seemed turned upside down. And, indeed, it is appropriate for this to be the case because Salman's new book does turn the psychoanalytic world upside down. We are in danger of being able to know what we are talking about.
This is a way of saying that we need to begin our approach to the book by recognizing what a remarkable achievement it is. Although writing any book is in some ways remarkable, a psychoanalytic dictionary poses special and enormously difficult challenges because it constantly confronts the author with the need to recognize the underlying values of the field that cause him to make hundreds or thousands of decisions about what terms to include and what terms to exclude. Further, in almost every definition decisions must be made about what psychoanalytic values are important, what values are relevant and what values are irrevelant. This cannot be a simple intellectual exercise because the values contained in definitions are the values that inform his work with patients, and he must wrestle with discovering misunderstandings of his own about fundamental concepts. It is no wonder that Salman makes reference to Simon Winchester's book describing the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) by Dr. James Murray in The Professor and the Madman (1998). Here we learn the incredible fact that a key contributor to the OED was an institutionalized patient—a psychotic murderer. Salman acknowledges that in a sense the project required him to internalize the personas of both Dr. Murray an