Editorial

It has been a pleasure, ahead of writing this editorial, to re-read the papers gathered for this November issue as they offer such good illustration of two facets of the Journal which the current editorial team have been keen to foster. The newer element is the more active fostering of strands of ongoing debate: previous contentions have concerned ‘relational’ replacing ‘traditional’ analytic stances, then came various views on Hillman and the legacy of archetypal psychology, and currently the focus is on psychology as the discipline of interiority and Giegerich's interpretation of Jung. Of course debate is not new to the Journal - the cluster of papers around Fordham's analysand ‘K’ would be a case many might remember - but our two companion papers comprising this issue's ‘Philosophical Contributions’ show just how rewarding it can prove to sustain such exchanges.

The other facet of the Journal manifest in all four of the clinical papers with which this issue opens is hardly new. Indeed it has always been at the heart of the Journal's endeavour since first conceived of by Fordham: and that is the clinical focus, the offering of accounts of, and reflections on, the immediacy of our engagement in the consulting room. It is absolutely fitting then that, albeit in different ways, each of these papers could be said to stretch our presumptions as to the boundaries of what is admissible - or indeed accessible - for analytic consideration.

John Merchant's ‘Foetal trauma, body memory and early infant communication: a case illustration’ relates how his patient, when able to contact his birth mother later in life, experienced a number of visions and ‘confronting synchronicities’ (incidentally an aspect of this case that furthers exploration of that territory of synchronistic embodied symptomology opened up by Richard Carvalho's Fordham prize-winning paper [JAP, Sept 2014]). Merchant considers whether the ‘telepathic’ dimension of mother-infant communications may be retained if