Editorial

The Editors are pleased to open the 1994 issue of the Journal with the First Annual Lecture from the Chair which was delivered to a very appreciative audience by Professor Emmy van Deurzen-Smith at Regent's College in October 1993, when she stepped down from the Chair of the Society for Existential Analysis. Dr Ernesto Spinelli has now taken on this role and we look forward to a similarly invigorating occasion this Autumn.

We are grateful to Dr Jeffrey Masson for his consent to the publication of his address, delivered at the December 1993 Society for Existential Analysis Annual Conference. Masson's paper, Issues of Power in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship, introduces a theme of this edition of the Journal - that of questioning the validity of psychotherapy. Professor van Deurzen-Smith illustrates the second theme -that of debate between theorists and practitioners - in her response to Masson. Kahr and Ticktin, writing on R.D. Laing, and Smith and Spinelli on the nature of the unconscious, continue these two related themes.

This edition also contains a number of additional papers dealing with both theoretical and practical examinations of particular existential and phenomenological concerns. Among these are Isaacson's timely analysis of a work by C.S. Lewis, while Chung applies an existential approach to sexual abuse.

The generation of serious intellectual debate must surely be a prerequisite for a responsible and expanding profession. So too must an awareness of developments in our discipline beyond the U.K., developments indicated by announcements of conferences in Austria, Germany and the U.S.A. which appear in this Journal. The Editors plan, where appropriate, to include papers from these conferences in future editions of the Journal.

The Journal exists first and foremost, of course, as a forum for communication and scholarly debate for and between its readers, and the Editors welcome contributions for the 1995 edition from the readership on the analysis of existence from philosophical and psychological perspectives.

Hans W. Cohn
Simon Du Plock