Book review: A bridge too far, but still impressive. Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology (2nd edn, abridged). Raymond J. Corsini and Alan J. Auerbach (Eds). Wiley, New York, 1998. No. of pages xvi+928. ISBN 0-471-19282-1. Price £50.00 (paperback)
✍ Scribed by Andrew M. Colman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 65 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In view of the fact that Corsini was the sole editor of the parent four-volume encyclopedia, it seems reasonable to surmise that Auerbach's chief role was to wield the knife that transformed the four-volume original into a single-volume abridgement.
The nature of the abridgement turns out to be something of a mystery. According to the foreword, the Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology contains abbreviated versions of most of the entries of the four-volume encyclopedia, having lost only historical entries and some biographies. The editors themselves assert in their preface that `through careful editing of the four-volume second edition of the Encyclopedia of Psychology we retained more than 95% of the entries and an estimated 95% of the contents'. These claims can hardly be true, unless the editors have developed a new version of the familiar conjuring trick in which pieces are repeatedly cut from a length of cord, but the cord turns out to be intact and undiminished in the end. A simple calculation will throw some light on what must have happened. Leaving aside preliminary matter, the four-volume encyclopedia runs to 2345 pages of text, or 1677 pages excluding the fourth volume, which contains biographies, an appendix, a name index, and a subject index. The single-volume abridgement contains only 928 pages of text, which according to my electronic abacus is only 55% of 1677. That does not take into account the smaller format of the abridged version. The Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology has a similar typeface but smaller pages and considerably fewer words per page than its parent encyclopedia, which means that the discrepancy in length between the two versions would be even greater if the dierent formats were factored into the equation.
It appears to be true that most of the entries have been retained, and a few new entries have even been added, but the majority of the original entries have been savagely cut, as my calculation shows they must have been. Chunks of text have been excised and the further readings' or further references' that appear at the ends of the entries in the four-volume encyclopedia have all disappeared, together with many of the cross-references and most of the ®gures and diagrams. This sometimes has unfortunate consequences, as when the entry on Guttman scale', which is perfectly clear in its original form, becomes largely incomprehensible without its explanatory diagrams. Other material that has been eliminated includes all the biographies ± not merely some biographies' as stated in the Foreword ± and the indexes and appendix from Volume 4 of the original encyclopedia. The historical entries' referred to in the foreword as having been lost are hard to trace. Entries on act psychology', faculty psychology'. phrenology', and several other obviously historical topics that I checked have all been retained in the Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology, although they have, of course, been severely truncated, along with other entries in the encyclopedia.
I cannot help wondering how the editors implemented the cuts. It is notoriously dicult to persuade authors to shorten their own texts radically, especially when the original versions are densely written in the style and manner of encyclopedia entries. A carefully written encyclopedia entry usually consists of text that has already been pared to the bone, or at least that is how the author usually sees it. Many of the abbreviated entries are still useful and informative, but readers should not be beguiled into believing that the original entries have been preserved virtually intact, or that 95% of the contents of the four-volume encyclopedia have magically survived the abridgement.
The loss of the subject index is particularly damaging, in my opinion. I can easily imagine why it would be a tempting target for a publisher or co-editor anxious to ®nd material to cut, because it might not be immediately obvious that a subject index is needed in an encyclopedia