A Conversation with Dr Michael Fordham

The contribution to Analytical Psychology made by Michael Fordham in the fifty years that he has been publishing his work has been immense. He has combined a full clinical practice with co-editorship of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, the development of the Society of Analytical Psychology, its Adult and Child Trainings, the editorship of the Journal of Analytical Psychology for fifteen years, and the authorship of over two hundred scientific papers and seven books (see J.A.P., Vol. 31, No. 3, 1986). He has given clinical seminars, lectured and taught in England, America, Switzerland, and Italy.

Fordham has made out a case that Jung was not interested in child analysis but he was interested in archetypes in childhood and the problems of children (Fordham, 1977). While it is certainly true that Jung published a study of a little girl, “Psychic Conflicts in a Child” (1910/1946), and that he wrote widely on education, (see C. W., vol. 17), his main interests were in the problems of the second half of life. In particular Jung was interested in the processes of individuation. Fordham's revolutionary contribution to this field was to propose that the self was an important factor in childhood and that the individuation processes were present at that time. Later he was to describe how the depressive position was the first step in individuation and how what was accessible during the early years of development submerged during the socialisation processes of education to re-emerge later (Fordham, 1985). Central to Fordham's theorising has been the idea of the primary self whose dynamic is deintegration and reintegration. Central too have been the links Fordham has made to the work of the Kleinians and his often repeated statement that archetypal images are almost the same as unconscious phantasy. The difference lies in the bipolarity of archetypal forms, what Jung described in terms of a spectrum of light from infra red to primary colours:

“The archetypal forms are