April Editorial

By the time you are reading this, William Meredith-Owen and I will have ended our term as co-editors-in-chief. Looking back as I write this final editorial recalled to my mind a conversation between William and myself about our aspirations at the start. Accessibility and support for authors from outside the traditional Journal heartlands of the UK and USA were important for me; William spoke for editorial rigour. This counterpoint of aims required sustained commitment from both of us, but over time I have got to grips with editorial rigour and William has reported enjoying his edit of papers from countries as geographically diverse as Japan and Brazil. Our term has not often been characterized by simple agreement, but instead by a complementarity of approach. The lively dialogue between us has underpinned activity on the Journal over the last five years. It is pleasing to find that the papers in this April issue so fully reflect those original aims.

Aditee Ghate's clinical account is from her practice in Singapore. She explains the particular vulnerabilities of its striving immigrant population, which contributed to the traumatic dissociation of her patient from inherited feminine cultural models. A vivid scene from the consulting room is at the heart of her paper, which weaves aspects of developmental and intergenerational trauma into a depiction that rings true to Jung's respect for historical factors.

Whilst Ghate focuses on cultural and historical environments, the next paper, from Ana Deligiannis on ‘Movement as active imagination’, focuses on the body as the environment for thought, emotion and all experience. An accomplished dancer and a student of dance herself, Ana's study of ‘how the body and imagination operate as pathways of knowledge’ - pathways to the unconscious - is philosophically, neuroscientifically and experientially informed.

The following paper, by Robin S. Brown, also explores the relatedness of internal and external worlds, but this time through