Editorial

In this issue we are publishing several of the key papers given at the IAAP Congress in Montreal last year. We are also publishing an edited version of an hour and a half long interview with John Beebe which is planned to be the first in a series of major interviews with senior figures in the Jungian world under the heading of ‘The JAP Interview’. It's appropriate for the interview to be published in this special ‘Montreal’ edition because the meeting between John and Beverley Zabriskie who interviewed him with such warmth and skill was held during the Congress. The only people present for the occasion were a small group from the JAP Editorial team, two of whom took on the roles of ‘recording engineer’ (Warren Colman) and ‘cameraman’ (Marcus West). In addition to the edited transcript presented here, selected video clips will soon be available to view online.

The idea for a series of interviews of this kind was given added impetus by the republication of Andrew Samuels’ interview with Fred Plaut after Fred died in 2009. In his introduction to the republished interview, Andrew wrote

I do not think the Jungian community in London has put enough energy and resources into our oral history. Maybe it is not too late to establish a project wherein, at a certain age, analysts are interviewed videoed/filmed both for publication and for archival storage.

This was a very welcome suggestion: I have always very much enjoyed interviews with senior analysts as they invariably give a different perspective from their written work. I find it especially interesting to hear about the personal and professional process of becoming an analyst—whether these historical stories are similar to or different from my own, they are invariably inspiring and revealing. Since the activity of being an analyst is pre-eminently an oral one and is largely passed on as an oral tradition through personal analysis and supervision, it makes sense that an analyst's oral account of their own ideas and developmen