Editorial

Authorial and editorial bias, linguistic and cultural difference, misunderstanding and the exploration of historical and philosophical areas of Jungian scholarship inform this April issue.

From Christian Maier, a winner of last year's Fordham Prize for his clinical paper on Intersubjectivity, we have meticulous exploration of the links between Jung's Tavistock Series seminars and the later development of Bion's theory of container/contained. Bion attended at least some of the Series - including one with his patient Samuel Beckett - but did not credit Jung (unlike Beckett). This despite the fact that, in the second of the lectures, Jung introduced the ‘idea of a psychic process by which emotional contents are projected by the subject into an object’ in the context of the transference and countertransference relationship. Furthermore, in the fifth lecture he ‘remark[ed] on the psychological meanings of a container’. Maier considers the role of ‘cryptomnesia’ (or hidden memory) in the development of theory (Freud was another victim of the same malady), and links this with the growth and an emotional integration that may occur during a period of latency; these, he suggests, were essential for the formulation of Bion's mature theory.

The publication in the Philemon series of Analytical Psychology in Exile: The Correspondence of C.G. Jung & Erich Neumann is an important contribution to the history of our field. These letters informed an earlier paper by Angelica Lowe (published in JAP, June 2015, pp. 336-52). In the current issue, Martin Liebscher draws on his experiences of compiling the Correspondence to write on the challenges of an editor's task. When the available documentation is incomplete, then locating, deciphering and dating source material is necessarily the first stage. Contextualizing is then required, especially as a degree of editorial bias and censorship can now be seen to have influenced the original Letters as edited by Jaffé and Adler: editors are but h