A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
A concise, single-author student reference to psychoanalytic terms.
An accurate and witty guide to the meaning of psychoanalytic terms.
Rycroft sets out the working vocabulary of psychoanalysis in short alphabetical entries, each defining a term and then, where the term is contested, saying who uses it and how the usage shifts between schools. The range runs from the Freudian core through Kleinian and object relations developments, with cross references that let one entry open onto the next. The revised edition adds thirty-six entries, an extended introduction and a fuller bibliography.
What marks the book is the sensibility behind it. Rycroft writes as an independent British analyst, sceptical of jargon and willing to note where a concept is loose, borrowed or in dispute, so a definition often carries a quiet judgement about the term's standing. For a clinician it works as a desk companion: a fast check on a word met in a paper or in supervision, and a compact account of why analysts disagree about it.
About the author
Charles Rycroft
Charles Rycroft (1914 to 1998) was a British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and an independent-minded member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, where he trained from 1937 and became a training analyst in 1954. Working within the Independent tradition, he grew critical of the Society's factionalism and later let his membership lapse. He is best known for A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1968) and The Innocence of Dreams (1979), and for treating psychoanalysis as a discipline of meaning rather than causation.
Details
- 1968
- Penguin
- Penguin, 2nd ed. (1995)
- 256
- 9780140513103