Editorial

After our April issue with papers from the Analysis and Activism conference, we are now returning to the publication of a variety of papers with academic and clinical relevance in addition to a fascinating interview with Warren Colman, a previous editor and regular contributor to the Journal.

The observation that Jung left behind little case material and detailed guidance on how his conceptions of the psyche might be applied therapeutically led Max Phillips to re-explore the different clinical approaches. In his paper “The Personal and the Transpersonal Psyche: Human Suffering, the Archetypes and the Clinical Encounter”, Phillips differentiates between personal and archetypal aspects of the psyche and he does not shy away from stating that in his view “distinctions between classical and developmentally oriented schools are still pertinent.” The author provides examples from literature to demonstrate how a one-sided transpersonal approach may ignore the patient's true needs and turn the analysis into an intellectual exercise. Phillips then wonders if a synthesis between the personal and the transpersonal approach might be possible. In questioning his own distinction between the personal and the archetypal, he explains that “the archetypal can only be experienced through personal, subjective experience.” In transcending the dichotomy, he concludes: “If symbolic images are then in the course of analysis linked to unique personal experience, they may open the possibility of a deeper understanding of something that cannot be expressed in words.”

Niccolò Fiorentino Polipo, in his article “The Love Problem of a Student—Revisited: A Psycho-Ethical Map for Cases of Anima Projection”, examines the topic of “anima projection” by returning to Jung's paper on “The Love Problem of a Student”. Polipo explores various dimensions of the anima concept and sets out a phenomenological description of characteristics of anima projections. By introducing us to examples from classical litera