Roudinesco, Elisabeth & Plon, Michel: Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse: Paris 1997 ( Librairie Artème Fayard).  1191 p.

Compared to previously published projects of a similar nature, like Charles Rycroft's “Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis” with 600 entries, and Laplanche & Pontalis' “The Language of Psycho-Analysis” with 417, the “Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse” contains 598 entries. Its approach is comprehensive. As the authors claim, it is neither simply a dictionary nor a specialist dictionary, and it is not limited to Freud's discoveries. “It intends to show the scope and classification of all the elements describing the thought system of psychoanalysis, as it has developed over the course of the last century as a special body of knowledge … This system is based on a concept [psychoanalysis] still being developed, on the history and original doctrine (Freud's work), and also on a genealogy of teachers and disciples, and of politics” (p. 9, Translation by the author). Given this perspective, the entries of Roudinesco & Plon cover various fields of research: “… the concepts, the countries where psychoanalysis spread (23), complete biographies of its actors, psychopathological entities which were treated and transformed by psychoanalysis, disciples, who were inspired by it, or who inspired psychoanalysis (coming from fields like psychiatry, anthropology etc.), the main cases (or prototypical cures) on which the clinical method was based, the established techniques of cure and the basic psychic phenomena; patterns of thought and behavior which were provoked or influenced by psychoanalysis, relating to birth, family, death, gender and madness.” (p. 9) The book further deals with founding institutions of psychoanalysis, with freudianism along with its various schools and their historiography; it lists contradictory impacts that psychoanalysis has had on intellectual, political and religious movements. Finally, included are “members of Sigmund Freud's family, Freud's immediate successors, writers and artists with whom Freud kept up important correspondence or with whom he maintai