Michael Fordham: Memories and Anticipations

I have always enjoyed being a witness at the birth of new ideas when they have evoked a creative anticipation of their future influence. One of these moments I vividly remember when Michael Fordham came to lecture in San Francisco in the 1940s. It was not long after the publication of his The Life of Childhood (FORDHAM 2), and we were not yet accustomed to the new concept of deintegration of the self-image that first appeared in these case studies. Hence he was not yet sure that his Jungian colleagues could accept a view of the self that seemed to counter Jung's teleological persuasion that the child has no effective relation to the self and only encounters its formative influence in later life. At this time in San Francisco Rhoda Kellogg, the director of the Golden Gate Nursery School, had been collecting pre-school children's finger paintings, in which she found a consistent pattern of abstract mandala-like designs which the children gradually transposed into observable objects: sun, earth, trees, houses, people. In other words, the original self-symbol was shown to be ‘deintegrated’ to make way for the child's perception of reality.

Having known Mrs Kellogg's work for some time, and wondering how to interpret the meaning of her then voluminous collection of paintings, I looked forward to Michael's reaction to them. It was truly rewarding to see on his face the light of recognition which told me that there was an unexpected confirmation of his theory. What it anticipated for me was a change in Jungian theory that gave images of the primal self a new clinical application as precursors of childhood development beyond the uroboric phase defined by Neumann. At the same time this encouraged me to focus on the self as a source and not to insist so strongly that it should be a goal for individuation in the Zürich tradition.

This orientation to the self then led me to the sense of a polarity between a primary and a secondary influence of the self in the