The Edinburgh University Press and I began this enormous project in 1998 and it has been almost eight years in the making. My initial approach to James Grotstein in Los Angeles led to his offering to supervise all the object relations entries while Murray Stein, then President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology, agreed to oversee all of Jung.
This Encyclopaedia is aimed at all kinds of students of psychoanalysis: practitioners, to be sure, but equally those, often in universities who are deeply interested in theory and its applications. Accordingly there is a full account of Lacans theory and a generous amount of philosophy as it bears on our discipline. For those interested in studying and extending theory there are substantial essays on the intersect with psychoanalysis and other areas: Philosophy, Religion, Film, Feminism, Linguistics, Literature, Science, Translations of Freud, Logic and Human Nature, to name but a few.
What happens in a psychoanalytic session is, of its very nature, private and what analysts do in their sessions often has little to do with the school to which they belong. For this reason very many analysts are pragmatists in private and learn from other approaches. In this volume readers will find detailed information on ten different schools of psychoanalysis but with this difference: they are not corralled off from each other.
For example, the reader looking up 'transference' will find no fewer than eleven separate entries. All entries are in alphabetic order, so, for example, the Freudian looking up 'working through' may happen on Zeigarnik Effect or the Jungian looking up inflation may stumble upon infinity or the Lacanian pursuing the concept of the matheme may glimpse Matte Blanco' theory of the unconscious as infinite sets.
In general the Encyclopaedia, while aiming for a more unified discipline celebrates the rich diversity of Psychoanalysis. Inspired by the the Irish Poet, Louis MacNeice's line: 'the drunkenness of things being various', I have included scholars like Laplanche and Sandler and rebels like Masud Khan as well as the casualities of psychoanalysis, Tausk and Reich.
There are some unusual features, the inclusion of Jung is one and the somewhat neglected figure of Fairbairn another. Child and Group PA are included, as are schools of existential, intersubjectivity and relational approaches. That this is truly an international encyclopaedia is borne out by the fact that there are over 1000 entries written by 374 authors from Germany, America, Ireland, England, Japan Australia, Hungary and almost every country in the world.