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The first thing that must be remarked about Salman Akhtar is what he himself has not hesitated to call his “demonic” productivity. A consultation of the Library of Congress catalogue discloses that, in addition to the book under review, he has, in the past three years alone, no fewer than six other authored or edited books to his credit (Akhtar 2008, 2009a, b, 2010; Parens, Blum, and Akhtar 2008; Akhtar and Parens 2009).1 It thus comes as no surprise that what I find most astonishing about the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis is the sheer magnitude of what Akhtar has wrought. With characteristic indefatigability, he surveys in an appendix all the glossaries, dictionaries, and encyclopedias of psychoanalysis— including those devoted solely to titans such as Bion, Lacan, Winnicott, and Klein—that have preceded his own effort. We learn that de Mijolla's International Dictionary (2005), a collective achievement of 463 authors, has a total of 1,563 entries, while Laplanche and Pontalis's classic Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967) contains 327 entries, and the revised edition of Moore and Fine's Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (1990) includes 490 entries by 296 contributors. Akhtar does not provide the statistic for his own Comprehensive Dictionary, but in a personal communication he has informed me that the total number of entries is 1,853. Thus, Akhtar has single-handedly surpassed by nearly 300 items the work of the 463 individuals recruited by de Mijolla for the International Dictionary.
Beyond qualifying Akhtar as a psychoanalytic Hercules, however, the fact that he has done everything himself means that his labor bears the stamp of a unique human subjectivity, rather than either purporting to offer an impersonal “view from nowhere” or else being a Hydra-headed