Editorial

This issue contains some unusual extras to our normal range of exciting papers, and we hope you will find real pleasure and interest in these additions.

One particular highlight is Shoshana Fershtman's interview with Jean Kirsch. It comes in two parts as it is longer than the regular format of the Journal. We are delighted about this important document. It gives a candid insight into the life of Jean Kirsch herself and is testament to the development of a remarkable woman, who grew up in poverty and an uneducated environment and found her way by following an unconventional path, guided by curiosity and a spiritual quest. She does not shy away from talking about her marriage to Tom Kirsch in an open and honest manner. At the same time, the interview paints a vivid picture of life in the United States in the 1940s, the early Jungian community in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the background of Jewish analysts fleeing from persecution in Germany. She also touches on more recent developments. Jean ends the interview by looking into the future with some concern, but also with faith in the guiding force of the unconscious: “Just to hold the anxiety of not knowing and allowing more being. I think that's a lot of what we have to learn as analysts—to hold our own anxiety. And to resist the temptation to do something.”

And, further, our next two papers contain different views on Jung's psychoid concept. Both of Pauli Pylkkö’s “Jung's Psychoid Monism” and Roderick Main's “Jung Among the Physicists: A Review Essay of Dual-Aspect Monism and the Deep Structure of Meaning” contemplate the question of the relationship between the physical and the psychological through a review of an underlying reality, which is neutral.

Pylkkö approaches this specifically from the point of view of the dialogue between Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, and argues that there are important differences between Jung and Pauli as regards the notion of this neutral reality. For Jung, this psycho-physically neutra