Commentary by an Analytical Psychologist

I have chosen to look at the way that the session illustrates the operation of Fordham's model of the deintegration and reintegration of the self in relation to discoveries in neuroscience. The session itself seems to me to be exemplary, a model of family work with under fives. I was deeply impressed by the way that the therapist could interpret Owen's need for mind to mind contact with his mother, his jealousy and attacks on the mother-therapist couple, his regression, his omnipotence, the guilt and anxiety underlying his violence, his oedipal confusion and his need to effect normal splitting between good and bad; and all this in the midst of his mother's distressed talking and Owen's frighteningly violent behaviour.

The finding that the development of the brain and, consequently, the development of the mind are ‘experience dependent’, operates in analytical psychology as corroboration of Fordham's model of the self. In his ‘Notes for the formation of a model of infant development’, he writes about how he sought to define the primary state of the self, based on Jung's proposition that the self is the totality of the personality, mind and body, whose goal is individuation.

When I did so I had to recognize that [the primary self] cannot be experienced - it has no features that can be experienced; but like DNA it unfolds when brought into relation with a suitable environment producing matter which can be perceived and experienced emotionally and mentally - the two classes of experience are not to be separated in the first place. It is from these subjective and objective data that the self is inferred; I conceived it to be a psychosomatic entity containing within it the inherited potential for forming the experience of a body and a psyche. This entity is bounded at first by a cell membrane and later by a skin. (Fordham 1993, p. 6)

Fordham saw the infant's self as separate from the mother, and in order to express the dynamic by which the self comes into relation to her he