Editorial

This issue of The Journal of Analytical Psychology takes us ‘home’, as the Irish-born analyst John Hill puts it in his richly evocative paper, to such topics as initiation, psychological types, adolescent individuation, and the relation of psyche to the soil that fosters it. These classically Jungian themes have a pleasing, old-fashioned ring at a time when the language of analytical discourse has become so generally syncretic that we often forget it ever had a mother tongue.

Jungian in another sense is the deeply self-reflective paper by Hugh Gee on the subject of his own strengths and weaknesses as an analytical supervisor. Because he makes it so clear that he regards himself to be as much in the supervision as any of his supervisees, he earns our confidence as he teaches us what he has learned about teaching others to analyse. Similarly, the paper by Bradway and Detloff, a follow-up to their classic research on the psychological type of analysts, first published in these pages twenty years ago, reminds us of Jung's insistence that the analyst must constantly refigure the ‘personal equation’ that is brought to analytical work.

Yet to return home is not necessarily to take one's parents’ word for everything: it is also an opportunity to question generational assumptions. In the midst of his paper on the analytic initiation, Sullivan re-examines a young homosexual man's ‘initiation’ dream, originally discussed by Jung in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. In the dream, the dreamer and a male friend stand before an altar in a vast cathedral. Suddenly, an elderly woman seizes the fraternity ring from the friend's hand, putting it on her own finger. Jung interpreted the dream as an invitation to the dreamer, from the unconscious, to mature, because it moved homosexual marriage symbolism in a heterosexual direction. Sullivan rightly notes the regressive pull toward the mother and the interruption of initiation in the dream, and the counter-transference attitude of the a