Editorial

The publication of two papers on Jung's ‘Answer To Job’ had been planned about a year ago for the October 1993 issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. Kate Newton and Eli Weisstub had met and talked with each other at the Chicago Congress of the IAAP in 1992. They discovered there that both of them were very much involved with Jung's analysis of this biblical story, the story of Job in the Old Testament, and that they both were in the middle of writing and thinking very hard about the meaning of this story and the possible psychic conflicts in Jung himself that his study seemed to expose. They decided that it might really be very interesting, and potentially illuminating, if their papers could be published together in the same issue of the Journal.

The basic theme of Jung's paper concerns the question of the nature of God, of man's concepts of God - particularly in relation to the presence and origination of suffering and evil - and of the nature and quality of man's - and Jung's - psychic situation and relationship to God, to suffering, to evil, to guilt, to consciousness, and to the perception that man has of himself.

These questions regarding God and evil, suffering and the very mystery of death inevitably surface in many of us whenever we are faced with the loss of someone valued and close to us.

Is it then a strange but meaningful coincidence that, in the same issue in which two papers appear concerning the character of God and of man, we should have to announce the deaths - within a few weeks of each other - of three of our very influential and highly esteemed members of the SAP, Ruth Strauss, Louis Zinkin, and Alan Edwards. Their obituaries in this Journal will, I hope, convey to our readers some of their character, qualities, and contributions. They will be missed.

The problem of shame has been raised in recent years in several papers. But in each of them the author, building on previous contributions, has succeeded in extracting and highlighting further