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The young man in The Waves, reading Byron, marked the passages that seemed to approve of his own character. He thought, as he drew his pencil there. ‘I too throw off my cloak like that, I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny.’
I, on the other hand, have been reading the first issue of Chiron, marking those passages seeming to elicit my approval of the respective authors' characters, and thinking, ‘I too do this’ or ‘I would rarely if ever do thus’. For, it must be explained, this first issue is devoted entirely to ‘Transference/Countertransference’, and there could hardly be any subject portraying the characters of the authors more frankly. We are lucky to have wide variety and high quality in the characters of the nine authors of the articles in this issue.
My heart immediately warmed to Chiron when I read, on the first page, the editorial policy on capitalising the term ‘Self’. The editors have chosen to allow authors to exercise their own option on this, unlike this Journal, which does not. To ask authors either to capitalise or to use the small ‘s’ on all occasions seems a procrustean exercise when so many meanings and emphases are possible, and the editors of Chiron seem to me to strike the right sympathetic note towards authors.
The name ‘Chiron’ consciously reflects the editors' aims to link the human and the bestial, the spiritual and the bodily sides of our human make-up. This aim is furthered in the first article, which is by Nathan Schwartz-Salant, on archetypal factors underlying sexual acting-out in analysis. He regards sexual acting-out as a kind of blundering after something elusive, namely, Jung's ‘Kinship libido’, which he prefers to call communitas. His paper describes how he attempts to help release it through coniunctio experiences in the analysis, consciously experienced by both analysand and analyst, often in a synchronistic way, and in which the bodily and erotic elements are fully experienced and recognised, though not of course acted upon