Editorial

The Journal has always been concerned to develop its engagement with its readership. Of course one such avenue of extended engagement is to turn towards the outer world, an initiative that will be explored at the forthcoming IAAP conference ‘Analysis and activism: social and political contributions of Jungian psychology’ to be held in London this December. But it is of the essence of the Journal that it remains at heart clinically orientated, and this is exemplified in this current issue which contains some exceptional papers that explore not just the edges of our clinical engagement, but also the edges of the metapsychological framework that informs such work.

The historical precedent for this is the absorbing account by de Moura ‘Learning from the patient: The East, synchronicity and transference in the history of an unknown case of C.G. Jung’ which relates his research into Jung's own groundbreaking work with one of his most influential but, until now, obscure patients: Maggy Reichstein. She turns out to be the analysand, brought up in the Far East, whose spontaneous production of mandala drawings was to furnish some of the core material of Jung's later writing. This is of itself sufficiently intriguing but what gives this paper a challenging clinical dimension is de Moura's subtle argument that the reciprocal impact of Jung's encounter with Reichstein not only stimulated his interest in synchronistic phenomena but was also responsible, at least in part, for his model of transference and countertransference dynamics that has come to seem ever more prescient. It is nowhere better expressed than in this passage (CW 16, para. 163) from ‘The Problems of Modern Psychotherapy’:

For two personalities to meet is like mixing two different chemical substances; if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. In any effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the patient; but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal in