Editorial

This issue of the Journal marks the completion of 50 years of continuous publication. The first issue appeared at the beginning of 1920, at a time when Ferenczi was President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. The idea of an official English-language journal had been mooted at the Munich Congress in 1913, but the realization of this idea could not occur until after the 1914–18 war. Ernest Jones was the first Editor, and held this position for 20 years, being succeeded by James Strachey in 1940. He was followed by Adrian Stephen in 1946, a triumvirate of John Rickman, Willi Hoffer and W. Clifford M. Scott in 1947, Hoffer in 1950, John D. Sutherland in 1960, and the present Editor in 1969.

One of the most important functions of the Journal has been to be the vehicle of the Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association and to publish the papers and discussions presented at the International Congresses. This alone would be enough to ensure its function as a record of the history of the psychoanalytic movement, but the fact that so many papers of great significance for the psychoanalytic movement have been published in the Journal makes its role as a central international organ even more substantial. The Journal was started with the intention of representing international psychoanalysis, and it has maintained its identity and function over the past 50 years. This is perhaps all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the administration of the Journal has fallen to the lot of the British Society. That this Society has been able to maintain the Journal through many difficult periods, and at the same time to preserve the Journal's independent identity, reflects the tradition of tolerance which has kept the British Society together even though it has contained so many divergent trends. The Journal has never become a partisan vehicle for any one trend in psychoanalysis, even during the years when one point of view appeared to be qui