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Jung's work has long been heavily criticized by psychoanalysts on a wide variety of counts and it is only in recent years that much serious and sympathetic attention has been paid to some of his views.
This development has largely resulted from the work of Dr Fordham and some of his colleagues in the London Society of Analytical Psychology, work that has particularly centred on the concepts of individuation, and of the self and its representations. These concepts, together with the theory of archetypes as innate organizers of psychic experience (rather than as repositaries of ancestral wisdom), have long been central to Jungian thought. However, they have usually failed to interest psychoanalysts or have been dismissed as, at the worst, mysticophilosophic, or, at the best, as inapplicable to the clinical practice of psychotherapy of any real depth.
These criticisms certainly cannot be levelled at Dr Fordham, and his book Children as Individuals is a definite step towards linking Jung's theories with child development and clinical practice, and thus providing a coherent and comprehensible foundation for Analytical Psychology.
The book is a revised version of The Life of Childhood, first published in 1944, and the fact that it has been almost completely rewritten attests to the evolution of the author's views in the interval. His increasing sympathy with psychoanalysis, particularly with Kleinian theory, is apparent, and his chapter on maturation contains a description of the development of part, whole and transitional objects which is a model of lucidity. Although he draws heavily on the work of Klein and Winnicott, his approach is consistently original, and he makes it clear that he disagrees profoundly with much that has been written by Jungians.
However, having rejected Jung's extreme position on the extent of the inheritance of culture, he does not on the whole disagree with Jung, but seeks to clarify and develop Jung's ideas. He points out that in The Theory of