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These collected papers on technique in the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy by Michael Fordham are the result of a careful distillation of Jung’s work and of his own.
They include a critical evaluation, which Fordham did of Jung’s work while editing his collected papers, reflections on his own experiences in two Jungian analyses, and his experiences and researches in his clinical practice including that with children.
The development of Fordham’s thought brought him more and more to a position of including again what had been eschewed by classical Jungians from psychoanalysis, especially the importance of transference in technique. It brought him, in fact, to a position where he felt very much at home with the work of leading psychoanalysts such as Heimann, Money-Kyrle, Klein, Winnicott and Bion.
Throughout the papers, he argues that the line of the classical school of Jungian analysts, which was to doubt whether technique could be studied, and their tendency therefore to avoid it, was to distrust technique as getting in the way of therapy and to a view that what Jung had not conceptualised was not able to be so. As a result of these attitudes, a great neglect of technical issues then occurred for many years.
Fordham also points out that Jung had at times seemingly contradictory attitudes on the significance of transference in analysis, expressing the view that it was not important at certain stages of life. But yet he did a very extensive study of the transference in his study of the Rosarium Philosophorum.
The selection of papers was made with a view to showing the progression of Fordham’s thought and this is quite comfortably achieved. But it is also acknowledged realistically that a fuller appreciation of the development of his thought would include a study of Fordham’s work on childhood development.
The clarity of the papers is especially to be appreciated since Fordham is often describing complex aspec