You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Editors are pleased to announce that the Michael Fordham Prize for the best paper relating to clinical issues submitted in 2009 has been awarded to
Christopher Mackenna
for his article, ‘From the Numinous to the Sacred’, which appeared in the April 2009 issue
Abstract: Jung took the idea of the ‘numinous’ from Rudolf Otto's book Das Heilige (E.T. The Idea of the Holy) and made it central to his understanding of religion. However, as Lucy Huskinson has recently pointed out, this involves a misreading of Otto's work in which we have to look beyond the numinous (which is the non-rational factor in religion) towards the ‘holy’ which, like a symbol, holds the rational and non-rational aspects of religious experience together in a personally transformative way. This understanding of the spiritual and psychological journey is supported by case material in which a numinous experience, arising in the context of intensive analytical psychotherapy, proved to be but the first step in a process which led, through a period of mourning, towards the development of the patient's capacity to symbolize. In the light of this, the author suggests that the sacred is to be found in the capacity for a certain quality of symbolic relatedness—to self and other—which may or may not be attended by numinous experience.
Submissions are now invited for the 2011 annual prize, which should reach the editors by 30 June 2010. For further details, contact the Managing Editor, JAP, 1 Daleham Gardens, London NW3 5BY. Email: