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Making
Psychoanalytic Scholarship Accessible: Mary Target International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(2), 547-550 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 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 In use,
the disc is surprisingly fast. Most people find it very easy to find a
particular journal, volume, issue and article. The text displayed on screen
is perfectly legible, although of course not as pleasant to read as the
original journal. (All sorts of options exist for printing out the articles,
but this is not intuitive for many new users, as I will describe later.)
Reading electronically does have some advantages, while still allowing
some traditional habits (for example, one can easily highlight and annotate
text). It is very easy to chase up a reference, if one knows it is likely
to have been mentioned in another article. References in the text are
hyperlinked to the bibliography of the article, pointing to the reference
then opens a window that gives the full citation. If the article is in
the database, it Another
real asset for writing is the copy and paste function. One can highlight
a piece of text and copy it into another document as a quotation. As the
original page numbering is shown in the text, the exact source is easily
I can confirm this,
and so can my printer. Students would like to be able to print articles
as you do a Word document: just click a ’print’ icon with the
cursor in the article you want to print, or specify a range of files in
the print dialogue box. I suppose the ticking and un-ticking would allow
you to print out the results of your searches cumulatively at the end
of the session, but this is not intuitive. The magic of the disc is its
searching capacity. I have only begun to explore its most obvious functions,
but even these are impressive. The occasional experience of a brick wall
when something apparently cannot be done (and the solution, when found,
does not seem to make sense) is far outweighed by the pleasure every time
it delivers. Say a student comes into my office to ask me about references
for an essay on psychoanalytic ideas about creativity. I want to find
a review article that will start him/her off on a good track. I enter
the word creativity in the box at the bottom of the search screen. Up
comes a Of course, the search could be far more complicated. The PEP database provides a number of templates, which are like short forms to fill in, to find a particular paper or group of papers. For example, what papers did Winnicott publish before 1950? I enter ’ Winnicott’ into the author field and specify ’ less than 1950’ in the date field. Up comes a list of nine references. I can then cut and paste the bibliography into a word processing package. The ’create bibliography’ function is a much-needed addition in Version 3. The bibliography can be printed quite easily and even emailed to a colleague. A handy feature is being able to specify the type of article, for instance book reviews, obituaries or letters. One is even supposed to be able to restrict a search to the content of reported dreams; however, I tried this and could not make it work. Searching can be set to exclude references or search terms can be combined. The program searches for words close together and within a single paragraph. The number of ’ hits’ is helpfully displayed so that the user knows when they have arrived at a manageable number of references. For example, ’ transference’ yields 9,600 articles; with the term ’ borderline’ , this is reduced to 698. Further restricting the search by the term ’ Klein’ yields only 22 references. Looking these up, the authors one might expect appear: Grinberg, Kernberg, Masterson, Rosenfeld, Segal, Sandler and others. In Version 3, the ways of searching the disc seem to have been revamped, so that they are fewer but highly versatile. You can also turn to the table of authors or journals if you prefer to browse like this; in Version 3, these tables appear when you click on ’ Quick Access’ in the Welcome window. A research student
who used the database extensively found the process of downloading articles
into another file cumbersome (for instance, it may be very helpful to
import the text into Word, to use other powerful writing When I talked to Kristiina
Jalas (who is the London telephone support person and an ex-student of
ours) about this review, she suggested that I emphasise that the tutorial
and Help file (on the CD ROM and website) help users tremendously. I was
recommended to look at that to make sure I understood how the database
works. Of course, despite having had the disc for at least a year, I had
never looked at the Help file (she knew that, because I had just telephoned
her whenever stuck). I found it extremely clear and easy to follow, anticipating
all of the problems my students and I had experienced, sympathetically
walking the user through the solutions. In fact, in less than half an
hour I had doubled the number of things I knew how to do with the database.
I do recommend that others MARY TARGET Copyright © Institute of Psychoanalysis , London, 2002 1
I would like to thank the past and present students on the MSc in Theoretical
Psychoanalytic Studies at |