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I begin with the conclusion: the PEP CD ROM is a magnificent tool for anyone interested in learning who has published what, when and where in the journals of the psycho-analytic literature from 1920 to 1998. With this tool, one may also annotate, print out various sorts of selections, leave bookmarks and perform a variety of other tasks. The PEP CD ROM is here to stay, unlike earlier efforts at indexing the psychoanalytic literature, and its use has become progressively easier with each of the three iterations or versions, with updates to come. The user needs to accommodate to the demands of a software program (Folio Views) that is rather more complex and different from the usual word processing and email programs, but it can richly repay the explorer's efforts in accessing the PEP database, particularly with the aid of the improved help facilities that are provided. The price seems expensive at first, but may be a bargain when compared with the increasing costs of journal subscriptions and the considerable effort it would take to gain access to the scope of the psychoanalytic literature provided by this product just once, let alone whenever one wishes. The PEP CD ROM Archive 1 Version 3 is a central and essential part of every psychoanalyst's library, of which it may actually constitute the core.
Now to begin this review, based on experience with the Windows version, the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) company's advertising over the past few years has made its product familiar to many psychoanalysts. In journals, on the internet and in demonstrations at conferences around the world, it is promoted as ‘The perfect research tool!’ That may indeed be so, but I imagine that, for many psychoanalysts, a more apt description would be ‘The Browser's Delight’. It is, in fact, the electronic recreation of the stacks of a library devoted to psychoanalysis. In these virtual stacks, the user may zero in on a particular bibliographic target and then allow curiosity fre