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This volume of eighty papers, presented by seventy-four authors during the second congress of General Semantics at the University of Denver in 1941, will do little to convince the psychoanalyst that he is missing much in not undertaking a serious study of general semantics. This is regrettable, for however far short of their pretensions the general methodological insights of this system fall, they nevertheless underscore certain highly useful correctives to the general body of Aristotelian logical devices with which we now make our individual and collective rationalizations.
The papers in this volume, some good, some bad, range over sixty specialties in the fields of art, science, industry, education, medicine and almost every other broad field of human behavior. The aim of each has been to indicate where and how the application of general semantics to the problems of a field has helped to clarify long standing confusions and to clear a path for constructive research on issues redefined in more meaningful, less fictionalized terms. Unfortunately for the uninitiated, almost all the papers presuppose a basic familiarity with the pioneer work in this subject, Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity.1
From the standpoint of arousing the interest of the psychoanalyst, however, is the more unfortunate fact that even for those analysts who have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with Science and Sanity, there is nothing in these papers that will dispel the feeling created by the earlier work that Korzybski and his disciples are simply talking through their hats (significantly, my typewriter first wrote 'talking through their hate') when they try to tell the psychoanalyst how to run his business.
The semanticians have worked out a system for an approach