Editorial

The search for a shared language

The April and July issues of the Journal of Analytical Psychology are dedicated to the papers and workshops from the Journal's fourth international conference, which was the first to be held in Europe. Prague lies at the centre of Eastern and Western Europe and the participants came from 10 different countries; nearly 30 were from the former Soviet bloc, including Russia, the Czech Republic, Georgia and Slovenia. This meeting of psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists, from the USA and Eastern and Western Europe, speaking several languages between us, was itself an enactment of the main theme of the conference ‘Diversity and its Limits’ and of the ‘New Directions in Analytical Psychology and Psychoanalysis’ that we intended to explore. In recognition of this diversity abstracts in this issue and the following will be in Czech and Russian as well as in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

An issue that emerged repeatedly throughout the conference was the need to find a language to communicate across the diversity of culture, history and professional allegiances which were represented amongst the speakers and participants. Above all, how we could find a shared way to understand and express unconscious dynamics, whose unknown contents can only beindirectly translated into a symbolic language by means of a range of metaphors.

In his keynote address, Alain Gibeault firmly placed this discovery of a symbolic language at the centre of the analytic process, regardless of the variations in setting and technique, whether it be psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, analytical psychology or psychodrama. For Gibeault, ‘the unity of the analytic process lies in a single shared conception of mental functioning: the requirement in all cases is to transform the tendency to immediate discharge in acting out into a capacity for and pleasure in fantasying and thought’. Gibeault suggested that this capacity depends crucially upon an openness to ‘otherness’. Pa