Volume 23, Number 9 · May 27, 1976
Actions Louder than Words
By Charles Rycroft
A New Language for Psychoanalysis
by Roy Schafer
Yale University Press, 394 pp., $20.00
Although written by a psychoanalyst for other psychoanalysts and largely consisting of papers already published in the learned journals, this book should be of considerable interest to a wider public, since it proposes a radical reformulation of psychoanalytical theory which, if accepted, would render outmoded almost all the analytical jargon that has crept into the language of progressive, enlightened post-Freudian people—without, incidentally, providing them with an alternative set of in-words. If we accept Schafer's thesis, we shall have to expunge from our vocabulary not only all specifically Freudian words such as ego, id, superego, impulse, cathexis, defense, but also and even such everyday words as love, aggression, guilt, and anxiety—though in the case of the latter group it will still be permissible to use their associated verbs and adverbs.
Review, 1789 words
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