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Since Jung each generation of analysts has assimilated values and insights of preceding generations and thus added to the discipline of analytical psychology. Very occasionally, however, there appears an innovator with originality and unusual creative power who has a fundamental impact on the existing edifice of understanding and practice. I consider Michael Fordham to be such an innovator. Many of us, through personal contact with him and/or by studying his prolific writings, have been fundamentally helped in their work with patients. I am writing this paper to express my deep gratitude to Michael Fordham for the help and inspiration which I have received from him.
In the short space available I should like to show how Fordham's concepts and discoveries have been instrumental in the supervision concerning an apparently hopeless training patient who, after three painful years of almost complete passivity, became analysable. As this particular patient was severely damaged at a very early level, Fordham's researches into infantile development, his discovery of very early defence systems of the primary self and his seminal ideas on autism were of vital importance. Most readers will be familiar with Fordham's concepts. Here is a very brief sketch of how I see their emergence in his work.
As is well known, in his work with children during World War II Fordham observed (simultaneously with Jung, though each oblivious of the other) that symbols of the self appear already in very young children's dreams and drawings. This made him postulate that the infant was born with a primary entity, which he termed the primary self. In his books, Children as Individuals, New Developments in Analytical Psychology, The Objective Psyche, and in various scientific