The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology [antikvár]

Preface to First Edition Dictionary writers incur certain obligations, the first of which is to provide the reader with a quick rundown on how the material is presented, what abbreviations are in use, what typesetting conventions have been employed and what notational formats are used. This obligation is fulfilled on page xviii. The second obligation is more delicate, to present the reader with a justification/rationalization of what has been wrought. That is the first task here. This dictionary is a little different from the standard list of words and their associated meanings and it is worth initially taking up a bit of space to give the reader some background information to explain how the volume came to be written, what my aims were in compiling it and why it has its occasionally eccentric style. I began thinking about a work such as this some twenty years ago when I was a graduate student. Students were required to write a number of essays in areas of psychology that were often quite remote from those of their particular concentration, and the first problem we had to deal with was that sudden jolt produced by the jargon of a new area. It was with interest that I discovered that when a Piagetian developmentalist used the term accommodation it meant something rather different from what was intended by a social psychologist studying the actions of an individual in a group or a vision scientist examining changes in the lens of the eye, that discrimination meant one thing to a learning theorist and another to a psychologist writing on race relations, that Jung's self was an entity of a rather different sort than James's. And it was with even greater interest that I began to recognize that these differences, compelling as they were, often masked subtle but critical commonalities in meaning and patterns of usage. When stuck, as I often was, I turned to existing reference works. I found most of the dictionaries I consulted, both within psychology proper as well as the more general, comprehensive works, to be of surprisingly little help. For the most part, they gave definitions using that 'zero-redundancy' style which typifies the reference work whose editors are desperately fighting length problems. In short, if I already had a pretty good hypothesis about what a term meant the dictionary could confirm or disconfirm it, but if I went as a child to find out how the term was actually used I often ended up more frustrated than when I began. As the years went by I began making notes on terms, notes not so much on IX