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This book is a collection of the twenty-five main papers given at the Ninth International Congress for Analytical Psychology in Jerusalem in 1983. The subject, the symbolic and the clinical, is surely the essential focus of the political arguments within and among Jungian groups; this international cross-section of the various Jungian approaches, models, techniques, hermeneutic methods and so forth, is like a projective test which, by activating the reader's tastes and distastes, can point up his or her place in the Jungian identity. Although most of the authors set out to demonstrate that the clinical and the symbolic are related, especially in practice, they do not propose an all-too-easy eclecticism: ‘We all use both, don't we?’ In fact, my own overall impression when I had read this collection through was that Jungian psychology was a complexio oppositorum, containing many mutually exclusive metapsychological premises, modes of practice and goals. I felt that looking for a common, denominating principle could be a defensive reaction, creating a false unus mundus, which avoids some really tense opposites. As well as trying to heal splits and appease conflicts, it seems we have also to agree to differ, disagree and even to live and fight within certain irreconcilable opposites. For example, the pairing of symbolists-clinicians can (with some licence) be equated with other dualities such as: metapsychology-clinical theory, structure-process, archetypal-reductive, amplification-interpretation, emphasis on the intrapsychic, emphasis on the internalised interpsychic, the impersonal (and narcissistic), the mutative transference (and related), the Jungian depth psychologist, the neo-Freudian technician, and so on.
Five of the papers have already been published in this Journal: ‘Attacks on analysis’ ( 28, 3, 1983); ‘Depressed patients and the coniunctio’ ( 28, 4, 1983); ‘The father's anima as a clinical and as a symbolic problem’ and Wilke's ‘The