Current Issue

From the Editor

Welcome to the first issue of the JJTP for 2009. Some changes have occurred since our last posting on Junginstitute.org. If, in the past, you received a paper copy of the journal, the web version is now the only way to read the JJTP, at least for the time being. The C. G. Jung Institute of New York, responsible for the journal, is no longer able to support the cost for sending a paper copy to all analysts and candidates in North America after encountering financial hardship due to the recession.

We are hoping that this is a temporary moratorium and that the financial situation for the Institute will improve. In the meantime, however, we will continue to publish as a web journal exclusively.

The current issue consists of two contributions. The first, by Philip Kime, currently completing training at the C. G. Jung Institute – Zürich, is an exploration of what maps and map-making tell us about symbols, symbolization, and archetypes. Dr. Kime suggests that the analogical and literal linguistic relationship which psychology has with cartography suggests that terms such as “augmentation,” “translation,” and “conflation” can be viewed as describing some of the basic elements involved in the operation of a symbol.

The second contribution is from Gabriel Cavaglion, a psychotherapist and senior lecturer at Ashkelon Academic College, School of Social Work and Department of Criminology, in Israel. He examines eighteen pictures by a four-year-old girl, Shira, during a period of regression triggered by the arrival of a new baby brother. In explaining her pictures to her father, she also related what the author regards as a monomyth which she called “The Little Princess and Her Butterfly.” Dr. Cavaglion suggests that Shira’s developmental crisis stimulated the compensatory unconscious material in her story, and rather than focus on the typical Jungian technique of picture interpretation, he amplifies Shira's material as an archetypal or collective narrative, a “universal developmental myth” that links Shira's personal difficulty with universal processes of the development of consciousness.

As in the past, your comments are most welcome and should be addressed to Soren.Ekstrom@gmail.com. If I find them of interest to the entire readership, I may contact you for permission to publish.

Soren Ekstrom, PhD
Editor