You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Analysts planning papers for an international congress write them initially to be delivered in the flesh, so to speak, before a live audience of colleagues. Yet the writers are well aware that these compositions will later face a potentially much larger public composed of readers who will be appreciative or critical in a wide scatter of places in the world and very varied states of mind. The time-lag is considerable: the proceedings of the fourth congress of the I.A.A.P. were published in the year of the fifth, and this review appears a year later. Papers which displayed assertiveness, or which had a manifesto quality at the time they were given, appear in print and may well affect readers very differently from the way in which listeners were affected in 1968. Some papers seem to grow over the years, or at least to remain alive; others do not.
The title of this collection of papers is the same as the overall theme of the fourth international congress and the positive comment which is the first to spring to mind is that each of the twenty-one papers is constructed round the description and the study of process. Something happens in every paper; that is the clearest of the unifying factors. Analytical psychologists do not each of them necessarily or compulsively build on the whole legacy bequeathed by Jung. They regard themselves free to select those major portions of his contribution to depth psychology which suit them individually and with which they can work; this gradual selection occurs as each acquires experience and shifts of emphasis healthily occur at different stages in an analyst's professional life. These may be consistent with training and with the national grouping's orientation, or reactive to them, or developed from them. As Dr. Wheelwright writes in his preface (p. xi), ‘The interesting thing is that we all get reasonably good results—as long as we remember that there is no right way to do analysis, but there is a right way for each one of us.’ Yet no