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James Astor begins his general introduction with the statement: ‘It is not widely known that Jung was interested in children, their conflicts and anxieties’ (p.1), and this is followed by a paper by Michael Fordham in which he tries to explain why Jung appeared to pay so little attention to children. The editors are helpful in placing Fordham's contribution in context: that when he first started working with children the theoretical and practical difficulties were enormous as the Jungian view was that childhood neurosis stemmed mainly from parental psychopathology and that the treatment of children was counter-indicated. Fordham ‘extended Jung's ideas about archetypes, the self and individuation to apply to childhood. He was the first to introduce the idea that the self, previously considered realisable only in later life, could be experienced by children in a way that was appropriate to their age. He also found that the archetypes of the collective unconscious, whose images could be demonstrated in childhood, functioned in essentially the same way as Jung described in the case of adults. From these two concepts he developed a theory of individuation in childhood’ (p. xiv).
This collection of papers by a number of Jungian analysts was conceived as a tribute to Fordham who did so much to further Jungian child psychotherapy in England. It was also intended to be an introduction to the general reader and I certainly found it a helpful one, some of it very vividly written and on not a few occasions thoughtprovoking.
The book's chapters are divided into five parts beginning with the ‘History and theoretical basis of Jungian child psychotherapy in England’. This includes two papers