Editorial

When Dr. Hoffer's resignation from the Editorship of the Journal became known, psycho-analysts everywhere felt an unusual regret. What he has done for the Journal in recent years is manifest and a steadily rising circulation is perhaps the testimonial he will like best. The extra twinge, however, is prompted by thoughts and feelings from other sources. Dr. Hoffer combines with those qualities which have endeared him so widely to all those who are concerned with the Journal, an almost unique range of personal knowledge of analysts all over the world; also, he continued the direct links which all his predecessors had with the Viennese Society as it was in its early phases. In taking over from him it will be readily appreciated that I have profound misgivings. I can only conclude that the Journal has entered a new phase with different, better defined, and less exacting, demands on the editor. The situation today is certainly unlike that described by our first editor, Ernest Jones, when he started the Journal in 1920. Then there were innumerable difficulties—tensions between the members of the young movement, international jealousies, and many anxieties over publication in a world hostile to our subject. A vivid impression of these trying times is to be had in one of his letters to Freud in 1932 from which he quotes in his biography of Freud:

As you know, I have endeavoured in English-speaking countries to further the same object that you described as being the Verlag's: namely to stamp a body of literature as being entirely distinct from the medley of rubbish all around. … It has been an uphill fight against the difficulties from within and without but we have accomplished something.

Happily that phase of struggle has been a thing of the past for many years now, and it was the successful efforts of Ernest Jones and those who followed him that established the Journal. The next sentence from this letter contains a policy statement which is very much in my mind a