The Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary Series: Languages of One Psychoanalysis and Many: “Migration and Mutation of Concepts” Across the Globe—Part 1

Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it.

The complexity and richness of psychoanalysis worldwide are lost on the wider culture that surrounds us when we psychoanalysts attach ourselves too exclusively to one conceptual network, one school of thought, or one psychoanalytic language. The present state of the pluralistic polycentered multi-regional psychoanalytic landscape brings up the increased need for worldwide scientific communication among psychoanalysts of diverse psychoanalytic geographies, in scholarly dialogue with other disciplines, and in a clinical context with the otherness of patients of a progressively widened scope. New methodological tools are needed to recognize, represent, navigate, and ultimately transmit this plurality and complexity to future generations of psychoanalysts. In other words, we psychoanalysts first need to be able to talk to each other and translate between diverse psychoanalytic languages before we (re)claim our relevance to the wider culture. A new kind of reference work is necessary for analysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, scholars, and educators to

make many psychoanalytic languages understandable, while doing justice to the richness and complexity of both the tradition and innovation. That translational tool is the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED).1

It is an honor to be part of IRE