Editorial

In this last issue for 2014, we are pleased to publish five papers from the Journal's XIIth conference—The Varieties of Jungian Clinical Experience: Complex, Identity, Intersubjectivity—that took place at the end of May in Berlin. Any introduction would be incomplete without a description of the context in which the papers were originally delivered, so this editorial sets the scene.

The cobbled city square in front of our conference venue is the site of outstanding period buildings built for purposes municipal, cultural, sacred and profane. The area is encircled within a recreational atmosphere: restaurants, open-air cafes and tourist conveyances of every imaginable kind surround the square. But stark reminders of division, a history of trauma and complexity are soon to be found in a close encounter between the old and the modern commercial city.

This mixed heritage was very much in the minds of participants as the conference opened with an account of Jung's Berlin seminars from 1933 by Giovanni Sorge. A spirited discussion followed his presentation, focusing on the political context of rising Nazism in which the seminars were delivered and questioning Jung's own attitude at that time. An atmosphere of challenge and enquiry thus set the tone for a conference in which differing perspectives on clinical work shared the stage with detailed historical studies and, also, with remembrance.

A dialogue between Jan Wiener and Matthias von der Tann followed, offering contrasted clinical attitudes and influences—the psychoanalytic confrontation of defences and a Jungian appreciation of symbol. Frank and open discussion of their respective analytic styles opened up the theme of the varieties of clinical experience, liberating listeners into a real, honest engagement with both case material and with difference. Regrettably, neither their paper nor Sorge's scholarly contribution could be published in this issue.

Christian Maier's paper on ‘Intersubjectivity and the creation of meanin