The Concordance to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Edited by Samuel A. Guttman, Randall L. Jones, and Stephen M. Parrish. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980, 6 Vols., lxxiii + 5512 pp., $525.00.

All English-speaking psychoanalysts are indebted to the editors for their inspired conception and dedicated labor in producing this important and facilitating resource for scholarly work in psychoanalytic research, editing, or education. A note of awed respect is also certainly due Cornell University's IBM 370/168 computer which was crucial to the practical realization of this monumental task. All Freud's words in context, as translated by James Strachey, with the omissions to be noted below, are made relatively easily accessible. Study of his word usage, imagery, verification and location of phrases (including the tracing of exact and similar repetitions), clues to the chronology of concepts, and other aspects of the written cannon are waiting to be revealed. The interested investigator must possess, however, sufficient analytic sophistication as well as ingenuity to ask the genii questions that will fully exploit its potential. It is obvious that similar requirements exist for the most effective use of every powerful resource. None of them, certainly including all computers, reveal their greatest realizable capacity to the unskilled or the beginner; they do not much inform the inadequately informed or respond to a simple "Open, Sesame!" And so it is with the computer-generated Concordance, which is certainly capable of responding to trivial questions with trivial answers; nevertheless, I believe it also demonstrates promise of responding to imaginative and prepared scholars with valuable additional insights into the unique heritage contained in Freud's writings.

A brief description of the Concordance's design may be helpful at this point, particularly for readers who are not familiar with what is primarily a word index as distinguished from the more familiar subject index. The two forms are significantly supplementary; they are not, and are not intended to be, substitutive in function.

The following is directly excerpted, with the exception of bracketed addi