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This is an outstanding book, one of the great works of encyclopedic scholarship—like the editing of the Standard Edition or Fenichel's Theory of Neurosis —that psychoanalysis needs in order to consolidate its fundamental propositions. The authors have taken the key concepts of psychoanalysis—clinical and theoretical—and, in spare, essential paragraphs, define each of these almost 300 terms, describe its implications, link it with the appropriate other concepts of the field, indicate the clinical material from which the concept grows, review the way its meaning was modified over the years, and quote the crucial phrases—with bibliographic citation—that precisely mark the meanings and nuances. They have done what they quietly promise:
We have deliberately chosen to analyse the conceptual equipment of psycho-analysis—i.e. the whole set of concepts which it has gradually evolved in order to account for its own discoveries. This book deals, not with everything that psycho-analysis seeks to explain, but with the tools it uses in doing so … Our commentary has striven to dispel or at any rate to make plain the ambiguities of the principal notions, to expose their contradictory aspects.
This is not a dictionary or glossary; by no means are the authors anonymous in their choice of quotations, underlining of themes, isolating problems and emphasizing the ambiguous; they give an excitement that lifts this work out of scrupulous, diligent, honourable, dull cataloguing to a classic of metapsychology. They have taken command of the essential literature of analysis; the meanings of our words, the history of these terms and their relationships with each other—the details and the grand sweeps of psychoanalytic thinking—are in this work, done in a most careful manner, precisely but without brutal condensation. And the whole is passed through the minds of creative analysts, not the pedants who might be attracted to such a task.
A reviewer might well compare this book with related oth