Critical Notice

The Objective Psyche, by Michael Fordham. London,  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. pp.  214. 255.

This is the second volume of essays and lectures that Dr. Fordham has published, and his third book. The three together form an interesting study in his development, his tentative beginning as a child psychologist, his tendency to formulate, now blossoming into a more fluid mode of thought, more accepting of human complexity and so of subtlety.

Alongside this development there is an increasing command of language, from the somewhat stilted style of Life of Childhood (1944), through a period of close reasoning expressed in carefully elaborated phraseology to the much greater freedom he now has in putting forward his views, without, on the whole, losing exactitude.

Part of his aim is to put Jungian psychology “on the map”, both academically and for a wider public. In this he has already been assisted by his wife in her Introduction to Jung's Psychology. He also hopes, while clarifying the more general concepts of analytical psychology, to make clear what is his own personal contribution to its development. It seems to me that in these two recent volumes he has succeeded to a considerable extent in both these objectives.

His two recent books consist mainly of talks delivered during the past fifteen years or so while he has been engaged not only in a full-time practice demanding mainly introverted thinking but also in the extravert role of being one, and not the least important, of the founders of our Society and a major influence in helping it to find its feet. The two collections cover a similar period in time but are selected somewhat differently, for whereas New Developments in Analytical Psychology (1957) was concerned mainly with the themes of early development in childhood, the ego and the self in its two aspects, concentrating on his concept of the “original self” and its “deintegrates”, the present volume called The Objective Psyche is more concerned with problems of adul