Editorial

In March the Journal celebrated its 60^th anniversary year with a weekend event held in London at Arundel House, an airy conference venue close by the Thames with expansive views across the river. The theme: Reflections on Jungian Clinical Practice: Then and Now, provided a framework for the plenaries you will find in this issue. Each speaker took a paper that has influenced their clinical practice — seminal papers representing the decades of JAP's history — and used this as a springboard for their presentation. The programme followed the timeline of these papers' publication from the 1960s to the present day, interspersed with moments to meet and greet old colleagues and the ritual consumption of 60^th birthday cake!

The papers appear here in their order of presentation. On Thursday evening, Angela Connolly and Jan Wiener started the ball rolling, tackling in different ways the knotty question of couch or chair, raised in Murray Jackson's 1961 paper ‘Chair, couch and countertransference’. Angela Connolly concluded from her very thorough investigation into this subject from the writings of more recent authors that there is little research evidence for benefits to the patient in use of the couch in the clinical setting. Whilst agreeing that the couch may be contra-indicated if the analysand is threatened by regression, Jan Wiener argued that it facilitates unconscious communications and the transference. She suggested that ‘infantile needs or primitive processes’ can be projected into the setting where they often go unnoticed and ‘are only revealed when the setting changes or is broken’. Taken together, the two papers provide unusually full discussion of this much-contested question concerning the setting for analytic work.

To a packed auditorium on Saturday morning, building on Fordham's important 1974 paper ‘Defences of the self’, Donald Kalsched held listeners spellbound with his moving account of a transference/countertransference enactment worked through by both pat