The Language of Psycho-Analysis

by Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

The definitive guide to psychoanalytic vocabulary. An indispensable reference book for anyone interested in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud evolved his theories throughout his lifetime. This entailed many revisions and changes which he himself never tried to standardize rigidly into a definitive conceptual system. The need for some sort of a reliable guide which would spell out both the pattern of the evolution of Freud's thinking, as well as establish its inherent logic, was felt for a long time by both scholars and students of psychoanalysis. Drs. Laplanche and Pontalis of the Association Psychoanalytique de France succeeded admirably in providing a dictionary of Freud's concepts which is more than a compilation of mere definitions. After many years of creative and industrious research, they were able to give an authentic account of the evolution of each concept with pertinent supporting texts from Freud's own writing (in the Standard Edition translation), and thus have endowed us with an instrument for work and research which is characterized by its thoroughness, exactitude and lack of prejudice towards dogma.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Reference

530 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 1974

About the author

Jean Laplanche was a french psychoanalyst.
He studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Later he began attending lectures and undergoing psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'll be honest. Reading this nearly killed me.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

clear concise explication of Freudian concepts by way of Laplanche

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise yet in-depth digest of Freud's intellectual searches and the conceptual universe of psychoanalysis, its theoretical corpus, questions of technique and their problems.

For me, didn't read like a dry compendium, but more like an immersion in an extraordinary experience of thought. Here it is as if reconstructed in a telescopic, condensed fashion.

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

معجم ممتاز للمهتم بفرويد ونظرياته، فاذا جنت مهتم بفرويد وشفته صعب عليك تقرأ كتبه بسبب المصطلحات فانصحك تقرا هذا الكتاب لان ٩٠ بالمية من مصطلحات علم النفس واضعها فرويد وبنفس الوقت راح تكون مستمتع بقراءة الحالات النفسية اللي تشرحها المصطلحات.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

everybody should have a copy of this.

[Spiderfingers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not really a book most will want to read from cover to cover, though I did try. I use it more like a dictionary for other reading I do on psychoanalysis and love it.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Foreword
o Number of premises
 Inasmuch as psycho-analysis has reshaped our view of most psychological and psychopathological phenomena, and even of man in general, an alphabetic manual aiming to cover all of its contributions might justifiably include not only libido and transference but also love and dreams, delinquency or surrealism.
 Rather than attempt to catalogue what seems, at any rate, to be a great multiplicity of usages, depending on place and time, we have sought to recapture the pristine novelty of Freud's concepts, now often obscured or lost; consequently we have paid especial attention to their genes
 Relevant studies
• Freud and also supplements (such as Klein)
• Terms coined by psych-analysis, even those not still in use
• Terms used by psycho-analysis in way that differs from the generally accepted psychiatric usage
• Terms which, though doubtless having the same sense for psycho-analysis as for clinical psychiatry, constitute the main axes of analytic nosology
 Articles are arranged in alphabetical order

[Dora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy grail for anyone interested in psychoanalytic theory and its Freudian fundamental concepts. Nobody can deny Freud's creativity in his theoretical explications, but his works sometimes lack terminological consistency one can easily compensate by having this psychoanalytical reader at hand