Editorial

This edition is substantially based around the conference held in Basel in October 2018, with the addition of an interview of Jean Knox, conducted by Warren Colman, and a paper by Pauli Pylkkö on Jung and Hegel.

The Basel conference was entitled, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Analytical Psychology: Recent Developments and Controversies’ and was organised jointly by the IAAP and the University of Basel. There is an introduction by the President of the IAAP, Marianne Müller, explaining the IAAP's intention in organising a series of conferences jointly with universities. This is followed by a piece by Christian Roesler, the organiser of the conference, who gives us a very helpful overview, both of the conference and of three areas of controversy.

The first controversy, that of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, was addressed by the keynote speaker of the conference, Mark Solms, in his paper ‘The unconscious in psychoanalysis and neuroscience’; although we do not have the paper itself, Roesler's overview gives us an outline of his argument. The papers by Nancy Krieger, Isabelle Meier and Philip Kime also addressed this area (see below). This was followed by the controversy around archetypes, addressed by George Hogenson, John Merchant and Erik Goodwyn; and in his overview Roesler offers us both his own analysis of the field and his own way through the labyrinth. Finally, there is the section on ‘Analytical psychology, psychoanalysis and contemporary psychotherapy research’, and Michael Buchholz's paper deftly explores the issues concerning research into the process of psychotherapy.

Starting with the long and frequently heated controversy about archetypes, George Hogenson intricately weaves his own personal understanding through a historical perspective on the debates. Starting from Stevens’ neo-Darwinist position and the development of the theory of archetypes as emergent (a fascinating view from one of the key figures in the theory's development),