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Psychoanalysis is over 100 years old. Over the course of the 20th century, many new terms
and concepts have been added to Freuds original constructs. This evolution has occurred
not just in Vienna, Berlin, or Europe, but rather, all over the world. Consequently, new
ideas have been formulated throughout and across the increasingly far-flung psychoanalytic
community, and despite the existence of an international organization with a rich scientific
program, regularly published journals, and an abundance of meetings and exchanges,
the language of psychoanalysis is not as uniform as one would expect. Some concepts are
understood differently and more importantly, have varying implications in different parts
of the world. Other ideas are highly developed and given special status in some countries,
while they are unknown or rarely utilized in others. To complicate matters further, schools
of thought have developed with variant degrees of deviation from Freuds metapsychology.
A student entering the field of psychoanalysis today has a more difficult task than students
of previous generations, in that there is much more to learn and understand, and a
greater imperative to be in communication with colleagues in other parts of the world. To
integrate the disparate concepts elaborated in different parts of the world, todays practitioner
and anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis must know, understand, and
be capable of evaluating many divergent ideas and theoretical constructs. Well-informed
dialogue among colleagues from different countries with other perspectives demands that
psychoanalysts have a resource—a handbook, so to speak—that provides a brief, concise,
but nevertheless sufficiently rigorous exposition of the lexicon of the field. |
