The original language of psychology and of modern psychiatry was German. The history of psychology is generally held to have started with the establishment of the first psychology laboratory by Wundt in 1875. The phenomenological history of psychiatry must start with Jaspers, and with Bleuler's identification of “the schizophrenias” (note the plural, which too many modern clinicians ignore, lumping a wide variety of symptoms together under a single label), while the original names in psychodynamic psychiatry must be Freud, Jung and Adler. The only Nobel Prize in psychiatry awarded so far went to Wagner‐Jauregg for discovering that general paralysis of the insane (GPI) was curable by infecting the sufferer with malaria. On the other hand, a century and a half has passed since Alzheimer first defined early onset dementia in the aged, without anyone as yet being able to find a cure.
All this has changed, however. The big break obviously came in the 1930s when, broadly speaking, the psychodynamicists who had not fled to America settled around Hampstead in north London and the phenomenologists settled around the Maudsley Hospital in south London. While the latter formed the core of the Institute of Psychiatry, the German equivalent of the Institute library was taken out and burned as “Jewish science”. Even in 1938, when Sir Aubrey Lewis did his masterly survey of European psychiatry (Angel et al., 2003) German thought still predominated in those countries he was able to visit. Since then, however, the swing to English has grown ever stronger. The venerable Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten struggled on until 1982 before changing its name to the European Archives of Psychiatry & The Neurological Sciences and in 1988 published its first edition entirely in English. The generation of British psychiatrists that is now fading away lived in terror of Sir Aubrey's seminars, where a missed reference to the previous week's issue of Der Nervenartz would mean a ferocious dressing‐down. Their present‐day successors have never heard of anything that is not covered by PsycInfo or Medline. Older German readers have had the further problem of having to switch from the elegant complexities of Gothic type to the brutal monotony of Roman, and now, under the influence of the Internet, are facing up to the further indignity of losing their umlauts.
This seems to me to be an excellent dictionary, fulfilling its purpose admirably. Having a fairly rudimentary grasp of German (special paper “German for scientists” O‐level, Ashford Grammar School 1959), I road tested it by trying to work through a random selection of abstracts of recent papers from Der Nervenartz and Fortschritte der Neurologie Psychiatrie. I found that, owing to my inadequate basic knowledge I did need to supplement it with a standard German dictionary – in my case Messinger (1988). This in fact, contained many of the terms I was looking for anyway. A major academic library with a stock of large general German dictionaries probably has less need of a smaller specialised dictionary like this. All the terms I looked up which were not in the general dictionary were in here, with the exception of a few drug names. Back‐checking my versions against the English‐language abstracts seemed to indicate that the translations were accurate. German is a very “nuts and bolts” language. Different terms are bolted together to make up words, and need to be carefully unscrewed before they can be looked up. This dictionary indicates the dividing joints very clearly and effectively, making it possible to check up some quite complex technical terms.
Tomas Ehring, a research worker in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry was kind enough to spend some time using the English to German half for us. He pointed out a couple of small but important points. The technical vocabulary of psychiatry is largely based on the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic & Statistical Manual DSM IV TR (2000), just as the technical vocabulary of medicine in general is controlled by the WHO International Classification of Diseases ICD 10 (1992). This dictionary claims to be up to date to the latest DSM and ICD terminology, but he noticed some terms which still appeared to refer to an earlier version of DSM, and a couple of DSM‐IV‐TR terms for emotional disorders which did not appear at all. Apart from this he strongly approved the dictionary, and said that he wished he had had it when he was a student.
Owing to the enormous linguistic predominance of English, I suspect that every German academic psychological or psychiatric library will need a copy of this book. However, in English‐speaking countries only those libraries whose readers really want to get into the deep historical roots of their subject will bother to invest in it.
