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At first the idea of a lexicon published for the three areas of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis seemed like a gift in the making. How nice it would be to have a handy compendium one could turn to and discover immediately what one needed to know, never having to do battle with the weightiness of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But then came the disappointment in finding that the selections are highly abbreviated. Virtually no entry goes beyond two and a half small pages; one has the feeling that something significant has been left out of the small space allotted. It is not as if the selection is without merit, but rather that there is need for something more, something like the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The headings are short to capture the reader's attention. As one would expect, the separate listings not only highlight the topic itself, but indicate who the psychologists or psychiatrists were who worked on particular psychological issues. For example, the article on “Activation and Arousal,” the second to appear in the book, brings in the work of Eysenck and the later work of Lacey and Pribram and McGuiness. This arrangement is a good one except that the material appearing under the heading is not always as substantive as one would like.
Every few pages still another arrangement headlines the name of some famous psychologist or psychiatrist whose work is reviewed, but again these well-known figures are not given much space. In all, the editor decided to highlight 22 men and women, all in alphabetical order but scattered throughout the book—such people as Adler, Bowlby, Bruner, Eysenck, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud, Horney, Hull; a page is even devoted to Lacan. These little vignettes are interesting, but they have