Editorial

The Journal's third issue of 2016 features an intriguing variety of papers, with challenges and rebuttals to fixed ways of thinking.

Susanna Wright's paper, ‘Boundary and analytic attitude: reflections on a summer holiday break’, muses on the nature of literal and psychological boundaries at the outer limits of the analytic frame, particularly ‘border’ crossings that crop up around the issue of the analyst's vacation. At such moments when the analyst is ‘going away’, deep reverberations from the patient's prior experiences of absence, loss and exclusion, are constellated in the transference. Wright shows how moments of parting may, with solid analytic work, become moments of meeting. She presents a case study that explores the multiple implications and enactments that arise at such times, often literally at the very last moment, and elucidates the analyst's struggles to negotiate, understand, sometimes interpret and sometimes hold the situation. The patient's challenging of the frame, especially in the absence of a subsequent session the next day or week, leaves the analyst with immediate and subsequent decisions to make. Wright addresses the analyst's relationship at such moments to her own analytic identity and traditions, noting the conflicts that can arise too at the boundaries of those well-learned templates.

The next paper, ‘Myers-Briggs typology and Jungian individuation’ by Steve Myers, follows up on his recent article adding the transcendent function as a ‘fifth’ function to Jung's model of psychological types. The present paper examines the correlated ideas that 1) Jungian concepts of individuation can be applied more widely to non-analytic populations and 2) the ways that use of Myers-Briggs typology can contribute to this. Myers notes that ‘individuation’ is rather amorphously defined in the Jungian world and that Jung himself had doubts about superficial or inept misusage of the concept by the lay public. The author nevertheless suggests that, while indiv