I am thrilled and honored to be a part of the initiative Thomson Gale (represented by Frank Menchaca as well as the highly-effective and ever-smiling Nathalie Duval) has undertaken to share this Dictionary, whose production I directed in France, with an American audience. This enormous and very difficult work has been successfully completed by a highly-motivated team, including (amongst the many others whom I shall not name): Rachel J. Kain, Rita Runchock, and Patricia Kamoun-Bergwerk; the remarkable American advisors Edward Nersessian and Paul Roazen who reviewed all the texts; Nellie Thompson, whose aid was invaluable at various stages in the project; Matthew von Unwerth, who compiled the "Further Readings" sections, and above all, the translators and revisers who fulfilled the difficult task of rendering texts into English that had for the most part been written by authors from France, Spain, Germany, and Portugal.

These translators encountered difficulties raised by more than just the languages in which the authors wrote about these psychoanalytic concepts or biographies they were charged with. Despite a common foundation stemming directly from Freud's ideas, divergent conceptions leading them to be grasped from slightly more theoretical versus clinical viewpoints, depending on where one is standing, were necessarily in evidence—a fact that had to be both respected and, at the same time, made more accessible to American readers.

However the sheer number of authors and the scope of their starting-points, as much national as related to different schools of psychoanalysis, nonetheless help us to avoid any sort of monolithic thinking, and beckon the reader to go beyond his or her reading of these dictionary entries with research that deepens their insight. For example, we have avoided repeating the precise definitions of terms cited by specific entries that the dictionary defines elsewhere. We have instead trusted that this dictionary would avail itself from page to page, concept to concept, psychoanalyst to psychoanalyst, to the likings of the systematic research or slightly poetic wanderings that constitute the most effective, or the most enlivened, approaches to getting to know a work such as this.

In the Preface to the French edition I offer detailed "directions for use" to readers of this work, so there is no need to revisit that subject. Let me rather use the few lines afforded me here to reiterate the particular importance of this American edition—in my eyes at any rate. It speaks English, like most of the countries in the world today, and English is, of course, an indispensable vector for any thought with claims to universality. Since its humble beginnings in Vienna, psychoanalysis has obviously had a global impact not only in the clinical and therapeutic realms, but also in the arenas of culture and thought. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by ideas whose development has deeply affected the existence of each and every one of us. Our sexual and political lives, our morality, our ways of understanding our relationships with others-all bear the unmistakable stamp of Freud's legacy. By virtue of his family background and his many-sided education and training, Freud ended up at the point of intersection of cultural inflluences out of (and against) which psychoanalysis was gradually forged. This dual process, by no means painless, ensured the new discipline a position and multiple functions, which, as we may now plainly see as we look back over the years, have themselves been subject to continual evolution.

A procedure for psychopathological investigation, a method with therapeutic aims, or a conceptual apparatus to account for the workings of the psyche (l'esprit) in its external productions as well as its corporeal bonds—out of this ideological and scientific past which Freud conveyed, psychoanalysis has, in turn, modified the conditions of research into the most varied domains of knowledge and none, today, may pretend to be totally beyond its influence.

No matter what position pharmacology assumes, (and we must believe in its progress), the encounter with the mentally ill, the listening to their discourse and the decryption of their delusional sayings in order to glean their secret message, like the patient reestablishing vanished relational capacities, will forever remain an affair that takes place between two human beings, from one psychical apparatus to another. The hope that inspired Jung and Bleuler when they first took responsibility for the schizophrenics in the Burghöltzi Asylum was as great as their disappointment. This phenomena repeated itself always and everywhere: Psychoanalysis began by appearing as "The Solution" to the unsolvable problems of mental illness. The example of America, beacon of enthusiasms and of disappointments, is illustrative in this respect—even more spectacularly so in that the all-powerful American Psychoanalytic Association permitted only doctors, psychiatrists for the most part, to join its ranks for the better part of 60 years.

Such is not the case today. Yet even though this puncturing of belief-systems might make us think of a destructive tidal wave, this investigatory drive remains—a drive that mobilizes psychoanalysts for their research into new clinical terrain, as they attempt to shed light on and treat ever more diverse and grave pathological conditions. One day, no doubt, new psychopathological conceptions will effect another exploratory synthesis of the psyche and its dysfunctions, thereby authorizing new avenues of approach that will once again appear to us as nothing short of miraculous. But in the meantime, the patient and modest relational exchange, which underpins the psychoanalytic approach to patients in the psychical domain, remains today's most developed adjuvant therapy, whose ever-greater efficacy and more precise pinpointing may be looked for in the progress of the neurosciences, neurobiology, genetics or immunology.

Although it continues to furnish, as Freud suggested, a "yield of knowledge" for other scientific domains, psychoanalysis gains its creative power and persistent originality from its position on the margins, due to the fact of its being the "other" that cannot be integrated into these disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, etc. It is the "other" which disrupts through its theoretical a priori of a subversive discourse subjacent to all manifest discourse and which, (as the example of Freud himself proves), can never forget that its own words, as well as its thoughts, are condemned to expressing double-meanings, to contradiction, to interrogation; and which could therefore never be thought of as a finished product, a self-enclosed theory, still less a dogma.

The turbulent political events of recent years have refueled the diffusion of psychoanalysis into territories that had previously been closed to it. Therefore both theory and practice will have to rub shoulders with new cultures, languages and other philosophical, religious, medical and scientific traditions. No doubt they will thereby come to brave new storms, know new successes and, fleeting declines. But we must always hope they will be capable of enriching themselves with these various contributions. For only thus is the never-ending research into the human psyche and its creations embarked upon anew—a quest that constitutes the psychoanalyst's true place in the world of yesterday, today and, for an unforeseeable time still, tomorrow.

Once again, I am particularly pleased and proud that the American edition of this dictionary is contributing, more so than all those that came before it, to extending and diffusing this perpetual renewal of Freudian thought throughout the world.

ALAIN DE MIJOLLA