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The PEP CD is an extraordinary achievement. Although I had heard about its growing pains for some years, I had had little access to it until asked to do this review, and had not fully appreciated the extent to which it made psychoanalytic scholarship more available. For a start, it is hard to imagine that this little plastic disc houses the full, searchable text of the key psychoanalytic English-language journals from their first issues: as well as this journal and the former International Review of Psycho-Analysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Version 3 has added Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. However, the disc is much more than the electronic equivalent of a psychoanalytic journal library. The search engine is what really makes the disc a tremendous resource for students, writers and anybody who needs to research any subject in psychoanalysis.
It may be most helpful to take the reader through the experience of using the disc, as a beginner. I am still learning, and sometimes struggling, but I can describe my experience and that of university students of psychoanalytic theory.1 I particularly wanted the disc for them, I thought it should be ideal for students, in their reading for class, essay writing and dissertation research. So, is it?
To start at the beginning, the installation is relatively simple. The Archive (Version 3) can now be fully downloaded on to the user's hard drive, provided he/she has enough space (about 700 MB). This means the user does not have to keep the disc in the CD drive and performance is faster. It also means that if, like me, you do most of your work on a laptop, you are not frustrated by having left the disc somewhere else when you need it. For users with too little hard disc space, a ‘compact install’ is available. The program will calculate how much memory the computer has free, and hence whi