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In this book, Maria Sidoli offers us a richly evocative clinical account of the processes of separation and individuation - the unfolding self in infancy. She is influenced by Michael Fordham's thinking. He, in turn, though coming from a Jungian background, has himself been profoundly influenced by Melanie Klein and Bion, so that his writings are a distillation of his own clinical insights, his loyalty to Jung and his recognition of the value of Kleinian developments for work in child analysis. Mara Sidoli tries to synthesise his formulations and shows how they underpin her clinical observations. This book offers the reader the opportunity to examine these ideas via detailed accounts of mother-baby observation and descriptions of psychotherapy with young children, adolescents and adults. These are all linked to the main theme of the unfolding self and the difficulties in subsequent development that result from early mother-infant dysfunctions and failures in early bonding. The strength of the book lies in her descriptions of these clinical observations. They are vivid, written with honesty and are often quite poetic.
There are several problems, however. In the first place one feels the writer to be struggling to address several theories of development at the same time. Jungian ideas are not always spelt out sufficiently well enough for the non Jungian reader to assimilate easily and both Jung and Fordham are examined, discussed and defined by quoting ideas from both their own and Kleinian writings as though all the different models were saying the same thing. This leads to confused conceptualisation and does nothing to enhance or extend her exploration of her way of working and her ideas are in danger of becoming ideological flags.
Sidoli follows Fordham's theory of the Primal Self. Fordham believes that it is a “steady state of integration” from which the child's ego and body growth will unfold thorugh dynamic processes he termed “deintegration-reintegration”. During