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One Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis, a Timeline: 1900-2000 by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Christine Dunbar Toronto: Caversham Productions, 2009
Every so often a product comes along that causes us to wonder why it hadn't been produced earlier and how we could have lived without it. Although this may read like an introduction to a review of a kitchen gadget that would be out of place in this forum, it is the opening of a review of a rather interesting and useful "timeline" of developments in 20th-century psychoanalysis. Since timelines don't have their own sections in journals, it is appropriate to review this unique instrument in the book review section of this journal.
A product of the collective imagination of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, an internationally known psychoanalyst, and Christine Dunbar, an active member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, and the founder and previous owner of Caversham Bookellers, the timeline accomplishes in print what we increasingly seekfrom the Internet. Housed in an attractive jacket, the production itself is printed on 12 two-sided eight-inch-square panels. Unfolding the timeline like an accordion reveals, on the one side, 12 panels with text provided by the authors, organized both chronologically and by topic. On the reverse side, we find the timeline itself. In order to manage the enormous amount of information in an effective taxonomic fashion, the authors make use of layout, colour, and spacing.
Taking the first panel (on the inside cover) as an example, across the top there appears a sequence of years, from 1900 to 1909 in grey type. This is matched at the bottom of the panel by the same sequence of years, with major historical events listed...