Editorial: JAP's Fiftieth Anniversary

This 50^th anniversary offers the editors and editorial team of the Journal an opportunity for celebration and also for review of the Journal's progress over these 50 years and its continuing development in the future. The editorial written by Michael Fordham for the very first issue in 1955, and reprinted below, gives us a reference point which enables us to see what the aims of the Journal were at that time and how those aims have evolved over the years.

The opening sentence of the Editorial states, ‘The first issue of this Journal is dedicated to Professor C.G Jung’. The JAP was founded as a Jungian journal and the exposition of Jungian ideas, with the aim ‘of increasing the influence of analytical psychology’, was its primary task and remains so to this day.

For the original editorial team, this aim was inextricably linked with the need to continue to develop Jungian theory in a number of ways, but above all by the description and discussion of clinical practice. The first editorial sets an ambitious agenda in this respect—nothing less than ‘to work out in more detail, or to apply in new spheres, those concepts which can and need to be subjected to scrutiny, constructive criticism, and elaboration’. Michael Fordham was absolutely clear in his first editorial that ‘Jung's concepts were capable of useful elaboration’ but also that recorded clinical material was essential in order for the concepts to be examined and developed. The notes for contributors in the first issue onward specify that ‘preference will be given to those papers that have a direct bearing on the clinical application of the subject matter’ of analytical psychology. For Fordham, a crucial feature of this process was the description of the analyst's use of his or her own countertransference in the analytic process, and he knew that this would meet with criticism and resistance from some colleagues. However, he argued that this approach continued the pattern established by Jung himself and, in large p