Editorial

In recent years, we have been saddened by the deaths of many significant figures in the Jungian world and the Journal has been committed to honouring them with obituaries by friends and colleagues. This edition is quite exceptional in that respect since we are publishing no less than four obituaries for some of the most important pioneers in our field over the past 50 years. The sense that a generation is passing is underscored by the coincidence that all their deaths took place shortly after the 50^th anniversary of Jung's death (6^th June 2011): Joseph Redfearn on 9^th June, Murray Jackson on 4^th July, Mario Jacoby on 1^st October and James Hillman on 27^th October. All four were born between 1921 (Redfearn) and 1926 (Hillman), placing them in that generation whose professional lives began in the aftermath of World War II when Jung was still alive and active and who came to prominence in the years following his death. Thus they belong to what Murray Stein calls the ‘third generation’, those who were analysed and supervised by analysts who had worked directly with Jung.

In their different trajectories they also represent many of the directions taken by analytical psychology since Jung's own time. Hillman, of course, was the most iconoclastic and internationally prominent of the four and the founder of his own school of ‘archetypal psychology’ which, as David Tacey's obituary describes, has spread around the world, albeit less prominently in Zurich and London where the other three practised and taught. At the polar opposite end of the spectrum was Murray Jackson who played a key role in the split between Zurich and London in the early 1960s when his paper on ‘Symbol formation and the delusional transference’ caused a furore at the 2^nd IAAP Congress in 1962 due to the strong Kleinian influence in his derivation of symbols from concrete bodily phantasies. This was anathema to those who later became known as the ‘classical’ Jungians, represented by Esther Harding's response