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RR 2011/55 The Counseling Dictionary: Concise Definitions of Frequently Used Terms (3rd edition) Samuel T. Gladding Pearson Boston, MA and London 2011 ISBN 978 0 13 705042 0 ix+ 197 pp.
Merrill Counseling
Keywords Counselling, Dictionaries
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111113965
In his introduction the author says that the first edition (2001) was triggered by a student asking him for the definition of a term. To respond he looked for a "dictionary of counselling" but failed to find one to suit his purpose. I am not sure that he looked very thoroughly however. At that time, I personally would have started with the Dictionary of Psychotherapy (Walrond-Skinner, 1986) or the Comprehensive Glossary of Psychiatry and Psychology (Kaplan and Sadock, 1991), both of which have an excellent coverage of counselling terms. There are innumerable dictionaries of psychology, most of which include most of the terms used in counselling - we have reviewed dozens of these in Reference Reviews over the years. The most recent reference book covering aspects of the field that I have seen was the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Akhtar, 2009), which includes a lot of the terms used here.
If he had looked only for a "dictionary of counselling" he would have failed to retrieve the very thorough first edition of Dictionary of Counselling now updated by a second edition (Feltham and Dryden, 2004) (RR 2005/124). This is, of course, due to the differences in the approach to spelling English pioneered respectively by Dr Johnson in England and Noah Webster in America. Feltham and Dryden largely ignore American spellings, and our present author completely ignores any non-American usage whatsoever. This, of course, considerably reduces the value of the book to readers outside the USA. The American appetite for books on all forms of counselling and psychotherapy is so...