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My first reaction when invited to review the new PEP CD-ROM was that I am not competent to do so. I am an active consumer of the psychoanalytic literature, but basically computer illiterate. I am too coddled to have mastered the technology and use it only for e-mail. The coddling is done skillfully, and as far as I can tell effortlessly, by Russell Scholl, my administrator for the last fourteen years and a talented and proficient “natural” at computers. My second reaction was that, just as we use the PEP CD-ROM collaboratively, Russell and I should collaborate in writing this review.
It seems amazing that the whole system is so small—seventy-eight years of the complete text of the major psychoanalytic journals all in the space occupied by a small book! The shelf space saved is worth the price (although pretty soon, all the other things one would put on those shelves will be just as compact). Even more important, everything is retrievable and accessible—no more searching through volumes of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly only to find that my memory failed and the article I sought had actually been published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, or that the article I remember reading thirty years ago was in fact published twenty years before that.
Russell installed the program (he will tell this part of the story in the following section of this review), and we sat down for my first lesson. I started where anyone would, looking up all my papers and all those that referred to them. It took seconds, and while there were no surprises on the first list, there were a number on the second. There were people I did not know and had never met who had cited me, and I could quickly and easily find them. I liked that. However, competitiveness soon won out over pride; what about some of my better-published colleagues? I learned (or confirmed) that they published much more than I, and cited me less often than I cited them. The truth hurts.