Editorial

When it was decided at the 1986 Congress in Berlin that the next Congress of the International Association of Analytical Psychology would be held in Paris, Elie Humbert expressed the hope and the wish that the principal theme of the Paris Congress should deal with our clinical work with patients, and the relevance of our clinical work to Jungian concepts and theories. We tried to do justice to Elie Humbert's wishes by choosing as the title of the Congress, ‘Personal and archetypal dynamics in the analytical relationship’.

Although Elie Humbert himself could not be with us at the Paris Congress, I think that many papers and discussions really fulfilled his hopes and expectations. There were in fact many clinical papers and many clinically relevant discussions.

I have chosen to publish in this, the April 1990 issue of The Journal of Analytical Psychology, four of the forty-minute morning papers because they seemed to me to be quite particularly pertinent to, and imbued with, clinical concerns in relation to analytical psychology. There were, of course, many others which another editor might have preferred to those I have chosen. And there were also many most valuable twenty-minute papers given in the afternoon sessions. All of these will be published in the Proceedings of the Congress which Mary Ann Mattoon is now editing. So the present selection is merely an appetiser, an hors d'œuvre.

The other three papers in this issue, by Dehing, Siegelman and Stein, also concentrate on the importance and the implications of some of Jung's basic thoughts and ideas on clinical work in the analysis of patients, ideas such as gnosticism, metaphor, symbolisation and the relationship between ego and self as betrayed by the pervasive presence of envy. These three papers thus seem to fit in with, and to complement, the four Congress papers.

Again, I hope that any or all of these papers may provoke comments, criticism and correspondence.