Editorial

This issue features selected plenary addresses and workshop presentations from the Journal's 14^th International Conference - ‘Dissociation: Trauma and Self’ - which was held in New York City in April 2017. Well attended and truly international, this conference, which was the Journal's first-ever in New York, featured 50 different presentations on this crucial subject, with perspectives that emphasized Jungian analysis, psychoanalysis, relational analysis, neuroscience, the transgenerational and the historical. Also well represented were the social, cultural, technological and political factors in which the conference's theme, and indeed all clinical work, are embedded. More of these presentations will be featured in future Journal issues.

Don Kalsched's plenary, ‘Trauma, innocence and the core complex of dissociation’, amplifies his ongoing thinking on the ‘broken’ hearts and souls of traumatized patients and a protective yet bi-valent ‘self-care system’ that results. Kalsched draws on a wide range of creative thought from Confucius to Jung to more recent analysts, but focuses particularly on visual imagery from William Blake's The Good and Evil Angels Fighting for Possession of a Child to make his case. His paper is ‘essentially an extended meditation on this image and how its various “parts” or “energies” enter the relational field of analysis and become both visible and problematic’. Several case vignettes (including that of Jung himself) are employed to demonstrate movements in the analyst-patient interaction out of a victim/perpetrator story and even out of identification with the self-care system in its traumatized form in order to reach recovery and mending.

In his paper ‘Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit’, Don Stern, a leading interpersonal/relational theorist, explores how the trauma which results in dissociation essentially ‘freezes’ what could be called psychological time (kairos) and hence a patient's new experience and possibilit