The long awaited revision of the Glossary of the American Psychoanalytic Association will be available at the December meeting of the Association according to the publisher, Yale University Press.
In preparation for several years, the book has been expanded into a mini-encyclopedia The format has been revised, new terms and concepts added, and previous definitions clarified and updated. Cross references to other terms defined in the volume and references to the literature are provided at the end of most of the short essays.
Included are major organizing concepts and their subsidiary terms; various psychic phenomena complex, overdetermined mental processes, behavioral manifestations, and activities; symptoms and nosological entities; principles of mental functioning; and characteristic features of psychoanalytic treatment. The primarily Freudian lexicon also contains a selection of terms from the work of Carl G. Jung, Melanie Klein and her followers, Wilfred R Bion, W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, and the Self Psychology school founded by Heinz Kohut.
Believing that such a reference work should be more than a collection of brief definitions, the editors have integrated the terms within the framework of psychoanalytic theory by tracing their historical development when relevant and relating them to other terms and concepts.
The editors have also made an attempt to protray the present status of psychoanalysis by presenting the advances in theory in relation to each topic. Hence, although the
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influence of Freud as the founder of psychoanalysis is still pervasive, the essays are not focused as exclusively on his work as has been the case in the past.
The revision, like the original Glossary, has been a project of the Association, which holds the copyright and receives all royalties. The Association can be justly proud of the scholarly contributions of its members. The 300 separate essays defining and explicating approximately 700 terms are the work of nearly 200 authors. As before, the Editors, Drs. Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, assumed responsibility for the final selection and organization of terms, necessary revisions, and the rewriting required for uniformity of style, balanced length, and consistent quality. They were given strong support by an Editorial Board consisting of Drs. Alvin Frank, Jules Glenn, Leo Goldberger, Eugene Halpert, Otto F. Kernberg, Selma Kramer, Sydney E. Pulver, Ralph E. Roughton, Vann Spruiell, Phyllis Tyson, George H. Wiedeman, and Edward M. Weinshel, with Drs. Jacob A Arlow, Harold P. Blum, Dale Boesky, and George H. Humpner as consultants.
The first Glossary was published in December, 1967, in connection with a Science Writers' Seminar under the sponsorship of the Committee on Public Information. Its purpose was to help correct misunderstandings of psychoanalytic terms and concepts, but it became a standard reference work, with many citations in the psychoanalytic literature.