I always appreciate it when the author/editor of a psychology text includes a glossary at the end of the book, so I thought I’d do the same here. Every author has their own idiosyncratic interpretations of any given term, and they don’t always make it clear exactly what they mean when they refer to resistance or borderline.

Memex

This glossary is also designed to function as a memex, or what is these days called a wiki. A Memex/wiki is a system for organising large amounts of information so that the inter-connections between ideas and information becomes visible. The most famous example of this kind of system would be Wikipedia, but the internet as a whole was specifically designed to make these interconnected “webs” of information possible.

My first encounter with a Memex was Corey Doctorow’s memex-style system, which he uses to organise his knowledge about technology and politics for his Pluralistic newsletter and other writings. However, the system itself was created in the 1930’s by Vannevar Bush for the same purpose: having a systematic way of reminding himself about information relevant to a given subject, and making it as easy as possible to access that information.

He wanted the Memex to emulate the way the brain links data by association rather than by indexes and traditional, hierarchical storage paradigms...

The goal here is to do the same thing in terms of the study of psychology and psychotherapy; to create a network of inter-linked pages which make it a bit easier to learn, understand, and remember the vast volume of information that is the subject of human psychology.

However, because it is, ultimately, a personal memory-bank, creating a memex is not about writing an exhaustive compendium of psychology (an impossible task for any one person!). Rather, it is a way of reminding myself of what I have learned so as to keep those ideas and theories alive in my mind and in my therapy practice.

So the pages herein will reflect the fact that not all aspects of psychology hold the same level of interest for me. There are theorists, theories, and modalities of practice that I find fascinating and want to learn more about, and there are others which hold no interest for me at all.

This memex will therefore expand on the line-of-least-resistance, so to speak, and I will add new information as I continue my research and follow my nose through the subjects that interest me most. Apologies in advance, then, if your favourite psychologist or theory isn’t represented here, or only cursorily. There are only so many books that one person can read in a lifetime…

This memex is also very much going to be a perpetual a work-in-progress, and at this early stage will seem woefully incomplete. I publish it here, nevertheless, in the hopes that the little that is here will be helpful to others. Be you a therapists or psychologists yourself, or someone struggling to understand the what, how, and why of their particular emotional and psychological suffering, I hope this small repository will be of some use to you.