Elizabeth Wright first published this text in 1984 at a time when psychoanalytic concepts were becoming a prominent preoccupation for students of cultural studies, literary theory, art history and other university programmes. As a Fellow in German at Girton College, Cambridge, Wright had identified an aspect of university scholarship that suffered from an insufficient understanding of the relationship between the differing schools of psychoanalysis in terms of their contribution to theories of literature and the arts. This first edition addressed this need: focusing on ‘theory in practice’ Wright identified the tropes of psychoanalytic discourse both as a means of comparison and as a system by which to investigate aesthetic concepts. In its time this was an ambitious project bringing together Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Jung,