Editorial

The papers in this and subsequent issues were originally presented at the Journal's 50^th anniversary conference at St Anne's College, Oxford, in April 2005. They demonstrate many aspects of contemporary Jungian theory and clinical practice, reflecting the developments which have taken place over the fifty years of the Journal's life. In all of these papers, a Jungian approach is enriched by the integration of ideas and information from other disciplines. This occurs without the loss of the unique Jungian emphasis on the transformational power of a confrontation, for an individual or a professional group, with ‘otherness’, be it our own or the group's unconscious, or the discourses of disciplines previously thought to be alien to analytical psychology.

We know that we need our theories but we also have to be constantly aware of the dangers of knowing beforehand, of not being open to the uniqueness of each clinical experiences and to encounters with bodies of knowledge with which we are not familiar and that disturb our world view. It is a dynamic tension which has been recognized and explored by analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts, from the debates between Jung and Freud onwards. Bion's injunction to abolish memory and desire, Sandler's discovery that every analyst develops implicit models and theories, Fordham's concepts of ‘not knowing beforehand’ and of the analyst's knowledge as a filing cabinet of familiar truths, are some of the most obvious landmarks in this continuing discussion. As analytical psychologists so often find, much of this has been beautifully summarized by Jung in a paragraph which Giles Clark also refers to in his paper in this issue:

As the most complex of psychic structures, a man's philosophy of life forms the counterpole to the physiologically conditioned psyche, and, as the highest psychic dominant, it ultimately determines the latter's fate. It guides the life of the therapist and shapes the spirit of his therapy. Since it is an esse