Editorial

This issue of The Journal of Analytical Psychology appears at a time characterized by much attack on the premises and practices of depth psychological work. On all sides it is being asserted that the practice of uncovering psychotherapy is so fraught with iatrogenic dangers that perhaps it should be strictly curtailed, if not abandoned altogether. Ours, it is charged, is a field that is rife with abuse, and prone to violate patients and their families in two quite basic ways. One is through the direct abuse that occurs when a therapist exploits the transference to engage in a sexualized emotional relationship with (usually) his patient. The other is more indirect, but no less insidious: it is the therapy's manipulation of the patient's relationship to personal history; this, it is claimed, can all too easily lead to a falsification of memory itself and to the disruption of the patient's relations with parents and other family members. Were it not for the clinical duty to take up every reproach against our practices and our premises and examine it with meticulous care, it would be tempting to account for the force and frequency of these accusations against our field on the basis of envy of its success.

The time has passed for such a glib defence. If analytical psychotherapy is to survive, it is going to have to demonstrate that analytic tools are adequate to address the shadow that the critics of our field have pointed out: it is not enough to counter by pointing out their Schadenfreude. The papers in this issue suggest the degree to which analytical psychologists the world over have been rising to this occasion, and they stand, we think, as a record of the integrity of our field at this time of challenge.

The paper by Petra Affeld-Niemeyer leaves no doubt that incestuous violation is a violence against the developing soul of the person and shows that a revival of the vitality and integrity of the personality is exactly what analytical psychotherapy is designed to faci