Editorial

At The Beginning of this year (Volume 33, No. 1, January 1988) I wrote in my editorial comments that I would try to publish, whenever possible in the same issue of this Journal, papers that deal with similar or related themes. I hoped that this might give cohesion to some of the issues.

In the last few months, whether as a result of the workings of synchronicity, or because the problem of psychological types has once more energed as a topic that claims renewed thought and attention, the fact is that I have had submitted to me several papers on Jung's typology. This has given me the opportunity to collect them together in the present issue.

I myself have tended to be wary of any typology as I fear that it could tempt one to categorise and so to over-simplify the complexity of persons and patients and of their interactions and interpersonal contacts and communications. I also fear that it might lead to an emphasis on fixity rather than on the dynamics of movement, change and growth.

The papers submitted and published here suggest that many colleagues are indeed concerned and embattled with the problem of how to retain the potentially valuable insights that Jung's typology offers and yet safeguard our availability to free, flexible and open observation and understanding of the people we meet, whether in our private life or in our clinical work. This is a challenge that they feel is worth meeting.

A part from the papers on typology, this issue also contains a paper by Dr Dreifuss, who has been much involved with what must be difficult and painful work: the analysis of victims of Nazi persecution; he has already published some of his thoughts about it. But his present short paper. ‘Persecution’, seemed to me to be worth publishing just now for our present world is indeed widely and deeply marred by, and in the grip of, the persecutor-persecuted syndrome. His ideas, so richly embedded in Jung's theses concerning the complementarity of conscious and unconscious experience and