Editorial

The Editors are delighted to open the first of the two issues of Volume Six of the Journal with the second Annual Lecture from the Chair. Dr Ernesto Spinelli's fascinating paper "On Disclosure" continues the high standard which was set by his predecessor and augers well for the future of this exciting annual event.

In keeping with the theme of this Volume, Worlds of Existential Psychotherapy, this issue includes papers on or from conferences attended by Society delegates in Germany and Austria as well as an interesting personal contribution from a leading Hungarian practitioner.

This issue also contains three papers from a recent conference at The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, among them an important paper by Dr John Heaton. These papers concern themselves with a critical assessment of the work of R.D. Laing - such an assessment, going beyond idealizing admiration on the one hand and a curt dismissal of his contribution to psychotherapy on the other, has long been overdue. The growing awareness of the important contribution which existential and phenomenological approaches can make to psychotherapy has resulted in a richness and diversity of practice in Europe and around the World, a situation which the 1995 Volume of the Journal will seek to illustrate.

While the focus of this issue is clearly on the worlds of existential psychotherapy, both in a geographical and philosophical sense, U.K. contributors feature strongly. That the Journal provides a forum for scholarly debate for and between its readers is evidenced by the recent exchange of papers on the unconscious by Ernesto Spinelli and David Livingstone Smith. Further contributions to this debate appear in this issue; the Editors welcome such debate and hope that similarly thought-provoking exchanges will feature strongly in future volumes of the Journal.

The Editors regret to announce the death of Prof Rollo May on 22nd October 1994. An obituary and paper commemorating his life by Dr Irvin Yalom will appear in the July edition of the Journal

Hans W. Cohn
Simon Du Plock