Vocabulário contemporâneo de psicanálise: Contemporary dictionary of psychoanalysis by David E. Zimmerman Porto Alegre:  Artmed Editora. Pp.  459. 1st edn. 2001.

This book, which is richly illustrated and presents a great wealth of information, and yet remains easy to read and understand, is at the same time current and ambitious. It is current as an academic project aimed at successfully covering the expanding universe of our contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge, and it is ambitious because of the necessary broad spectrum required to do this.

The author responds to this challenge by stating that the best dictionaries of this kind specialise more directly in the work of a given author and his/her respective psychoanalytic school. He believes that, to date, no book has successfully integrated the most important psychoanalytic schools in a way that would offer a synoptic view of the psychoanalytic concepts from pioneering times—Freud and the authors who followed him, the dissidents and those who extended his concepts—up to the contributions that are being made today. His intention is to help clear up a particular prevailing conceptual confusion which is due to the use by different authors of the same terms with distinctly different meanings, or to the fact that one and the same concept receives different labels, all of which could lead to the Babelisations of psychoanalysis.