It is a great pleasure to inform our membership that a new and revised Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts was published in October conjointly by the American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press. This book is the fourth edition of the book by the same title edited by Burness Moore and Bernard Fine, published in 1990. Their book was the third edition of the original Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, first published in 1967 and revised in 1968.
Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts represents our best efforts as co-editors-in-chief to bring together and explicate psychoanalytic terms and concepts used in the discourse of contemporary, North American, English-speaking clinical psychoanalysis. It is presented in the format of a lexicon with terms and concepts arranged alphabetically. It is a hybrid of dictionary, encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, textbook, and intellectual history. The overriding mission of this book is to help those interested in psychoanalysis achieve a better understanding of the terms and concepts we use to describe the human mind and its interaction with other human minds in everyday life, development, psychopathology, and the clinical setting.
Our goal has been to provide an accessible yet sophisticated reference book for use both within and outside our field. We hope this book will promote communication among psychoanalysts who use different terms and concepts, as well as between those in psychoanalysis and others in neighboring disciplines who use the same terms and concepts in overlapping ways. However, our chief imagined audience consists of students of psychoanalysis, struggling to read our literature and to make sense of our theories and practice. Our hope is that by using this book as a guide, students at all levels of training, including candidates, psychiatry residents, psychology graduate students, social work and medical students, and undergraduates will better understand what psychoanalysts are saying about the mind.
Since the last edition of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts was published in 1990, the task of defining terms and concepts has become ever more challenging. Increased theoretical pluralism, advances in psychoanalytic research, and the explosion of new knowledge from allied disciplines have all contributed to a rapidly expanding psychoanalytic discourse. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts reflects current theory, technique, and research. It also includes entries describing the work of psychoanalysts who have made significant contributions to the field. Finally, it includes an expanded bibliography of important papers that have created and/or elucidated important terms and concepts.
Each term/concept is reviewed in terms of its origins and the developmental history of its usage. Points of convergence and divergence in the current usage of psychoanalytic terms/concepts are discussed. Existing efforts to operationalize terms and concepts for the purpose of research are also noted. Areas of overlap between psychoanalytic terms and concepts and those of neighboring disciplines are explored. We feel that this kind of contextualization provides a bridge between the glossary format and a “mini-encyclopedia” that leads the reader from a study of language into the full richness of psychoanalytic thought.
Most intriguing is the problem of how to capture the rich diversity of contemporary psychoanalytic discourse while maintaining an integrated point of view. While Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts is authored by over 150 contributors and worked on by an editorial board of some 30 psychoanalysts chosen to represent a diversity of voices, interests, and theoretical expertise, there is no escaping the fact that this book expresses a point of view—the point of view of the co-editors-in-chief. Indeed, the most complex challenge we have confronted has been the problem of how to recognize, properly apply, limit, and acknowledge our own point of view. We recognize that every aspect of this project has demanded that choices be made, choices that raise the issue of authorship, even the dreaded specter of “authority,” or, at the very least, this problem of point of view. In 2011, we discussed our views of this problem at greater length in an article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled, “Psychoanalytic Lexicography: Note from ‘Two Harmless Drudges.’” We look forward to discussing this question further in a Symposium planned during the APsaA National Meeting on “The Politics of Psychoanalytic Lexicography.” Meanwhile, we thank everyone who has supported this project since its inception, and the many who have worked hard to bring it to publication.
Editor's Note: “The Politics of Psychoanalytic Lexicography: Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts” is scheduled to take place at noon on Saturday, January 19, during APsaA's 2013 National Meeting in New York City. The book is available at yalepress. or .
Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, M.D., is senior associate director and training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and vice-chair of Graduate Medical Education and professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Eslee Samberg, M.D., is the former president and training and supervising psychoanalyst of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and clinical professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College.