Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

Salman Akhtar defines more than 1,800 terms and concepts drawn from across the psychoanalytic field, from abreaction to the zone of proximal development. Each entry runs short and clinical: it names the term's originator, traces where the idea came from, and shows how its meaning has shifted as the discipline absorbed new work. Where a single word carries different freight in different schools, the entry sets those readings side by side rather than settling on one.

Because one author wrote every entry, the dictionary holds a consistent voice and a consistent standard of judgement. Akhtar reads widely across Freudian, Kleinian, object relations, self psychology, and contemporary relational currents, and his own catholic, historically minded sensibility governs what each definition emphasises and what it leaves out.

For a clinician at the desk, it settles a term quickly and points onward: an annotated list of earlier glossaries and a full reference apparatus close the volume. Karnac published it in 2009.