The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology

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Acknowledgements
So many people have endeavored to save me from myself. I thank them all and absolve them of all blame for lexicographic sins overlooked. Those deserving special mention here are: Israel Abramov, Rhianon Allen, Dean Diggins, Joseph Hosie, David Raab, Bernie Seidenberg, Julia Vellacott and Carl Zuckerman. I'd also like to single out Peter Phillips to whom I am much indebted for his work on the final manuscript.
Finally, one special note of thanks to Martin Richards, who labored long and honorably. More than any other he knows the frequency with which I have acted and written foolishly. He is a gentleman and a scholar and with great pleasure I cite him here for contributions to this little list of words.
A.R.
Preface
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 xii. 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.
1 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
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PENGUIN REFERENCE
This important and wide^^ranging reference work clarifies approximately 17,000 terms from psychology, psychiatry and related fields./
In this dictionary Professor Rehier resolved some of the problems raised by psychological terms. It is, however, mucli more than a compendium of 'raw' definitions.'As .well as focusing on what a given technical term means, the author shows how the term is actually emplbyed, its connotations and how it has been used - and abused - in the past. The result is a volume of enormous interest, ; written with the broadest possible audience in mind.—^ _
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'Written in simple and straightforward language and refreshingly free from ] pretentious jargon The dictionary is as much a joy to dip into as to use. It is | far and wide the best reference work of its kind' - Paul Edward, Emeritus if Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York
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'The best dictionary of psychology since Warren's 1934 volume of -extraordinary value*^^- fiu/iet/n of the British Psychological Soc/e^
'Reber brings<,h;umg^r/aiid c^ÎTion sense to defining some 17,000 terms deserverto"become a classj)c'i)f jts kind' - The Times Educational Supplement Vissza