Comments from Former Editors

In honour of the Journal becoming forty years old, the present editors have asked previous editors, of which I am one, to contribute their reflections about the publication. Since I was largely instrumental in shaping it, I thought I could best say something about how it came about and how its policy was developed. Although I designed what it should contain, the initiative in producing the Journal had come from the Society of Analytical Psychology and especially from Simon Stein. There was not the international opposition that I half expected, based on the idea that we were being presumptuous and flying in the face of Zurich's authority, but the Swiss wanted a finger in the pie in order to make it more truly international: it was proposed that C. A. Meier should be co-editor with me. When that was rejected by the S.A.P., the idea was more widely canvassed that it be named The British Journal. However our committee firmly insisted that ours was the first Journal of Analytical Psychology and intended to be international anyway. So the project went forward and I was able to obtain financial support from the Bollingen Foundation, who thought a journal was desirable to enhance the prestige of analytical psychology and to complement the forthcoming Collected Works.

My intention was to present the clinical orientation of the Society without giving the impression that we were excluding contributions from the wider disciplines, access to which Jung had opened up: on the contrary we welcomed them except when they violated analytical observations.

The first issue was intentionally composed of articles written by members of the Society. It started with a weighty one by John Layard analysing the dream of a schizophrenic patient using amplifications from his anthropological researches in masterly fashion; a longish clinical paper on depression by Robert Hobson; Robert Moody's pioneering essay on countertransference; a colourful if somewhat sensational essay entitled ‘Loathsome wome