Fordham the Clinician as Seen in his Writings

The extent to which Michael Fordham has committed his ideas to paper is very considerable indeed. The Bibliography (p. 307) contains some 220 items: papers, articles, reviews and books. If it were represented in graph form, the development of his observations on child patients and adult ones could be traced in what would, I think, show a firm and persevering curve which conveys remarkable self-possession, using that term in an untechnical way. While Fordham the man has always seemed to me to have a quality of combined magnetism and idiosyncrasy, with at times some pure wickedness, his writing is invariably steady, it is consistent, calm, full of concepts and conceptions, it is attentive to theses and theories, problems, phenomena and processes. It is often very compressed. He defines his terms. He develops his arguments. He musters evidence. He moves carefully from observation to hypothesis, to concept, to theory, to conclusion. In the Foreword to New Developments in Analytical Psychology, Jung wrote: ‘Every single one of [these papers] is so carefully thought out that the reader can hardly avoid holding a conversation with it … in the desire to carry the objective discussion a stage further and collaborate on the solution of the problems involved.’

Jung added that a ‘foreword should be content with the role of an intellectual aperitif (FORDHAM 1, p. xi). That is the aim of this paper.

It should be noted that Jung wrote ‘conversation with it’—not ‘him’. This paper is for those who, with me, did not have Fordham as analyst or supervisor, but who would like validly to deduce how he is and how he operates in those two capacities from those of his writings which exemplify his way of working. It is not possible to use more than a few written sources of information in the space available, so a selection has been made which it is hoped will show: i) the way in which his scientific approach is applied to what constitutes analytic