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Fordham's second edition of his book The life of childhood has undergone some revision based on his twenty-eight years' experience in child analysis, and the title has been changed to Children as individuals. The change of emphasis reflected in the title is away from Jung's ideas of the child's dependence on the parents' psychic health for his well-being towards the study of the child's own affective processes. There has been a corresponding change in his technique, in so far as he does not play with children to the extent that he did before nor stimulate them to make pictures and to tell dreams. He now believes that ‘children receive more benefit through analytic understanding than being analysed more indirectly through their paintings and dreams’.
In chapter one, ‘Antecedents’, he shows his new orientation. In the original book he dealt with the contrast between ego-development and the process of individuation with the religious element in the centre, and in this book holds that ‘the individuating processes are active in infancy and childhood, and that they are an essential feature of maturation’ (p.27).
In this present view the child's primary or original self is disrupted by birth but becomes re-established again. During maturation disrupting and re-establishing of the self occurs again and again due to deintegrative-integrative forces. After the first disruption the self becomes united with the mother in the phase of what he calls ‘the nursing couple’, a phase which E. Neumann has described as ‘mother child unity’.
Out of this union further deintegrations occur and structures develop which enable the infant to ‘manage’ objects, both good and bad ones, first the mother's breast, then such objects as pieces of rag, later soft dolls or animals. These activities involve early attempts at representations until the child's ego becomes established at about two years of age and the separation-individuation phase starts. Fordham here refers to Jung's definition of individu