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My Rather Slight Remark on Kathleen Newton's contribution to the subject of fusion was no doubt based on a misunderstanding of her position, for I have found her writings difficult to assimilate. I had, however, arrived at the point of understanding that her propositions on the subject were better than many others, and her lucid exposition shows that I am at least right in drawing that conclusion.
I am grateful for her appreciation of my own contributions, especially her evaluation of the concept of the original, or primary, self of which she has made use. I agree with her that it has opened up perspectives previously shut off from the investigations of Jungian analysts—it did that for me, too.
There is much in her ‘Comment’ with which I agree, or which could easily be made the subject of discussion in a very different field of investigation. There is, for instance, the subject of the relation between the depressive position, transitional objects (and phenomena) and other avenues of development; there is the relation of conclusions derived from infant-mother observations to later forms of imagery which refer to the same basic theme, and so on. Those are subjects which will no doubt exercise us for many years to come. They can only be decided by careful analytic investigations, observations and experiments. I have, however, come to rather firm conclusions about the use of the term self, and I would like to use this opportunity to state those conclusions. They are at variance with those of Newton.
Some years back—in —I considered the theories of the self in Jung's publications (FORDHAM 1). I found that he used the term in two senses: first as a concept referring to the whole or ‘total’ personality—as such it was ‘irrepresentable’; second, as an archetype, and that was closer to the self as expressed symbolically. This contradiction had been brought to Jung's attention and he wrote a special definition for the Collected works in which he made his position as evident as he