Psychoanalytic Lexicography: Notes From Two “Harmless Drudges”

Abstract

The co-Editors in Chief of the American Psychoanalytic Association's new edition of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (previously edited by Moore and Fine and last revised in 1990) recount their lexicographical adventures. Editing a dictionary at the turn of the twenty-first century is a daunting, some might say foolhardy, undertaking. The most obvious challenge faced by the editors was the growing pluralism within psychoanalysis. However, a more fundamental challenge was that the object of psychoanalytic study, the mind and its processes, can be known only by putting words to our observations, inferences, and interpretations. Psychoanalytic thinkers, starting with Freud, have wrestled with this challenge in ways that define the history of psychoanalysis itself. Long gone are the days when Freud could commend the "correctness" of Sterba's lexicographical efforts. Today postmodern critics, at the opposite extreme, argue that terms and concepts are best understood as "verbal gestures" in the "language-game" of psychoanalysis. Some go so far as to assert that dictionary-writing is obsolete. The co-Editors in Chief of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts have not succumbed to such nihilistic views, but have instead struggled to establish a reasonable stance within contemporary debates over the nature of psychoanalytic language.