St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) is traditionally credited for the first concordance, which was for the Bible. Some noteworthy ones in this century are the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, and the Cornell Concordances to Byron's “Don Juan', and to the poems of Emily Dickinson. Concordances allow any scholar or researcher to find a reference quickly, compare passages and concepts. The Concordance to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud will allow researchers in psychoanalysis to do the same thing.
A concordance is an index, but far more detailed and elaborate. As the 14th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, a concordance is “literally agreement, harmony: hence, derivatively a citation of parallel passages and specifically an alphabetical arrangement of the words contained in a book with citations of the passages in which they occur.” Spread in six volumes, Freud's Concordance lists over one million words and phrases found in the Strachey translation. The alphabetical arrangement of key words, followed by every phrase in which each key word appears, makes it possible to discover all contexts quickly and easily. A frequency number is included for each key word, allowing researchers to determine—at a glance—the number of times Freud used any word.
Each quoted line of context includes the corresponding volume and page number in the Standard Edition, an abbreviated title of the article or essay from which the word comes, and the date that the work was first published. The date makes it possible to trace terms and concepts chronologically, as well as developmentally and historically, by reading the pertinent pages in the Standard Edition. Researchers can easily determine when a particular term entered Freud's vocabulary and how it evolved.
The Concordance includes two appendices of special interest to all students of Freud. The first appendix ranks key words by frequency—from “dream,” which appears in the Standard Edition 6113 times, down to words with a frequency of about 100, such as “aggressive,” “tradition,” and “revenge.”
The second appendix, a pagination converter, makes it possible to move directly from the quoted line in the Standard Edition to the corresponding passage in Freud's original Gessamelte Werke. Moving to the German text from the English provides access to one of the richest sources of insight into Freud's mind—his use of images or metaphors, particularly those in which his theoretical concepts are presented.
Published last spring by G. K. Hall of Boston, the Concordance to Freud's work (as it appears in The Standard Edition) is the labor of love of Dr. Sam Guttman, Training and Supervising Analyst of the Philadelphia Institute and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior (Psychoanalysis) at The Thomas Jefferson University Medical School in Philadelphia. He conceived and edited it with the assistance of Professors Stephen Parrish and Randall Jones, both of Cornell University.
As Professor Norman Holland put it, “Nothing but a concordance will track down that elusive half-remembered quotation hiding at the edges of memory. Nothing but a concordance will permit the detailed study of a concept that underwent great change over Freud's career. Nothing else will permit the tracing of the imagistic and metaphorical associations that reveal Freud's own mental processes.”