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This is a revised and enlarged edition of a textbook which first appeared in 1973, published by Allen and Unwin, and then was reprinted every three years from 1979 onward by Karnac. Its steady reprinting, and now its reissue, testify to its usefulness. Professor Sandler has argued for many years that much of the confusion and antagonism between rival versions of psychoanalytic theory could be clarified, and even cleared up, by a steady attention to the shifting meanings of the terms which are used. This is a familiar problem in all disciplines which develop a specialised vocabulary; it is exacerbated in those areas which lie very near to our most deeply-felt beliefs and experience.
Many of the concepts in psychoanalysis were first coined by Freud; interested in and sensitive as he was to problems of metapsychology and of meaning, he was more interested in trying to pin down his changing thoughts and ideas as they occurred to him, and as they were altered by his changing conceptions of the psyche. Two sources of confusion were immediately added. The first was the problem of translation. It is notorious that his English translators used Latinate terms instead of his more everyday German, trying to separate his concepts from concrete experience and give them a more impressive medical gloss. But we cannot simply reverse this by re-translating Freud. Other authors have used his concepts, as he intended them or as they understood them, and traditions of thought have branched off from them; it is as if we tried to get a tree to grow straight by cutting off most of its branches and twigs, taking with them the flowers and fruit. The Strachey et al translation of Freud was to have great influence, partly because it was excellently executed, early and in full, partly simply because more psychoanalysts, like doctors, engineers or any other professional group, speak English as a first or second language than any other.
Generations of analysts have used concepts such as the ‘ego’,