Editorial

I have been asked to introduce myself, the Journal's new US editor-in-chief, and I am pleased to do so. I feel honoured to have been selected for the post, and I am delighted to be joining the Journal staff and especially to be working closely with co-editors Susanna Wright and William Meredith-Owen. I first met Susanna and William in person at the Boston JAP conference in 2012, but I had already admired their written work from afar. At this time of writing, I have just returned from the most recent JAP conference in London, and am still enjoying the warm welcome sent my way and the lively interchanges of the conference. It was a pleasure, too, to link up with managing editor, Jane Turney, and other members of the UK editorial board.

Following in the footsteps of my friend Linda Carter, who has stepped down as US editor, is a formidable task, as she has served the Journal with such distinction and for so long. Linda set a high standard for both editorial excellence and active, personal support of authors and new ideas. I will strive to meet that standard and, indeed, the standard set by UK editors, starting with Michael Fordham and, by now, a significant line of US editors, including Linda, Michael Horne, Joe Cambray and John Beebe. Fortunately, Linda has generously offered to be available for consultation ‘any time, any place’, and I have already called on her and her predecessors for guidance.

As for my own background: my Jungian path began with the need for analysis and, later, a sense of vocation. My core Jungian identity became somewhat hybridized through graduate training and early clinical experience, and, by the time I entered analytic training in 1984 with the Inter-Regional Society in the US, I was strongly influenced by psychoanalytic perspectives. I was lucky, in that my training reinforced this. For example, one of my supervisors was SAP-trained; another had a classical psychoanalytic perspective; a third favoured Klein, Bion, and Langs; and another was a