To participate in the step-by-step construction of an international dictionary of psychoanalysis is a strange adventure, marked not only by enthusiasm but also from time to time by disillusion. The process might well be compared to the education of children, a realistic view of which (sometimes attributed to Freud) asserts that one may be almost certain that one's hopes will not be fully realized. All the same, the years I spent with the editorial board assigning and patiently gathering in the more than fifteen hundred articles comprising this work, and the subsequent years preparing all this material for publication, have been among the most exciting I have known. One reason was the variety and cordiality of the international connections that the project created; another was the growing awareness of the vigorous multifacetedness of psychoanalysis as a whole, which has been evolving for over a century now within so many different nations, languages and cultures.