The concept of a consolidated, searchable electronic archive of psychoanalytic journals emerged in the early 1990s. Paul Mosher proposed a full-text CD of psychoanalytic journals as early as 1991—an idea far from commonplace at the time. Parallel initiatives were developing in London with Peter Fonagy and David Tuckett. In response to Mosher’s proposal, Vann Spruiell of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) led an initial team, PACT, to explore producing a disc. In 1996 a more formal publishing effort began with the establishment of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP), a joint venture of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Institute of Psychoanalysis (London). Each parent organization provided $300,000 in start-up loans. The original board comprised Nadine Levinson, Paul Mosher, and Judith Schachter (U.S.) and Peter Fonagy, Martin Miller, and David Tuckett (U.K.); Alice Brand Bartlett replaced Judy Schachter in 1999.
Technical and editorial design work began in 1995. Neil Shapiro, as technical consultant, collaborated with Mosher, Fonagy, and Tuckett to design a database structure that would allow sophisticated searches across psychoanalytic literature. The structure categorized text by journal, year, and text type (article, title, reference, author), enabling precise retrieval. After evaluating search engines on cost, speed, cross-platform compatibility, usability, and presentation of results, Shapiro and Mosher selected Folio Views. For digitization, PEP chose manual rekeying—deemed more accurate and cost-effective than optical scanning—and instituted rigorous tagging and a 99.9% accuracy standard for the re-keyed texts.
Archive 1 concentrated on six leading journals spanning more than seven decades (1920–1994): The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; the International Review of Psycho-Analysis; the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; The Psychoanalytic Quarterly; The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child; and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. To secure publisher cooperation, PEP implemented a three-year “moving wall” to protect print journal revenues—electronic-only access was deferred, reflecting the era’s nascent view of electronic publishing.
In its earliest years, PEP operated with minimal infrastructure: directors worked pro bono, distributed across continents, communicating primarily by email. Board tasks were shared but decisions were collective. David Tuckett and Nadine Levinson managed global sales and marketing, while other board members handled testing, financial management, website design, and system implementation. Martin Miller developed the initial PEP website for marketing and customer support; Stephanie Short provided customer service. David Tuckett later developed the Psychoanalytic Database System (PaDS) to manage subscriptions and fulfillment. The board’s sustained volunteer effort—averaging two to three hours daily between 1996 and 1999 and amounting to thousands of hours and thousands of emails—was critical to PEP’s progress.
PEP Archive 1v1 launched on December 7, 1998. The first update, Archive 1v2, added content through 1997 and shipped to over 1,000 customers in May 2000. Financing milestones included paying off initial loans from the parent organizations in November 2000; the PEP Foundation made grants back to the supporting organizations that December.
Organizationally, PEP converted to a nonprofit. Under the leadership of finance director Peter Fonagy, the board explored nonprofit status and feasibility. Nadine Levinson managed the process of establishing U.S. nonprofit equivalency for the Institute of Psychoanalysis. PEP became a Section 501(c)(3) public charity on January 20, 1999. The parent organizations remained member organizations with their powers essentially unchanged, while PEP’s mission formalized around promoting scholarship, research, and outreach for psychoanalytic literature.
Content expansion has been a central priority. Subsequent Archive releases added journals, additional years, and classical texts. By the sixth iteration, Archive 1v6 had incorporated 12 additional journals and 23 classical books. PEP’s most notable acquisition was the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1886–1939). Over time the archive grew to more than 44,000 articles and 54 classic books, covering 117 years of scholarship—fully linked and searchable.
A significant transition came with PEP-Web. From 2002 onward PEP developed an online platform and sold the first annual licenses to major universities. PEP-Web expanded rapidly and now serves over 100 universities and public agencies, while offering low-cost compulsory annual subscriptions to members and students of psychoanalytic and psychotherapy institutes; more than 15,000 individual subscribers have been recorded. PEP also maintains programs to provide low-cost access in financially compromised regions.
In May 2006 PEP launched a new interface developed by Global Village Publishing (GvPI) to mark Freud’s 150th birthday. The PEP Web Literature Search introduced free searching of archive and current content, robust authentication to protect copyright, open URL linking, and integration features for library catalogs. Integration with search engines such as Google Scholar enabled broader discovery—while full-text access remained controlled by PEP authentication and subscriptions. The Scholars Committee contributed many user-centered enhancements.
Financially, PEP has returned substantial royalties—over one million dollars—to journals and copyright holders, including the estates controlling Freud, Melanie Klein, and Angela Harris. Throughout its development, the commitment and labor of the Board and staff, and the feedback from a loyal customer base, have been central to PEP’s mission: to preserve, organize, and disseminate the literature of psychoanalysis in accessible electronic form.