Some Thoughts on Deintegration

In all his creative work as one of the most original analytical psychologists since Jung, Michael Fordham has coined only one new word. This is ‘deintegration’. Although he has introduced other concepts, such as the original self and the syntonic counter-transference, he usually makes use of the existing language. In this respect he has shown an admirable restraint, but his introduction of this new term is all the more a measure of its importance in his thinking. New words, if they catch on at all, have a way of only gradually becoming incorporated in the language and there are, in the recent literature, signs that deintegration has come to stay. It has been used, however, only referentially in the course of theoretical and clinical discussion or given a brief exposition in other texts and has not yet been the subject of an extensive critical review.

This contribution is called ‘thoughts’ because, although I have wrestled with the concept of deintegration for years, I still do not feel I can fully grasp and evaluate it. For me, it has been one of those ideas, like many of Jung's, which once intuited become vitally necessary but which are very hard to think clearly about. As so often with Jung, I am not sure whether Fordham himself has, over the years, used the word consistently with the same precise meaning.

So at this stage, as I do not feel qualified to attempt a detailed analysis, I shall simply try to set out both the importance and the difficulties in the concept of deintegration by looking at it within a framework slightly different from that customarily used by Fordham.

It is clear from Fordham's first detailed exposition of his idea in 1957 (FORDHAM 2) that he was faced with difficulties in the word ‘integrate’. Although we can talk of things being unintegrated, reintegrated or disintegrated, he needed another prefix, one not already in existence, to denote a state that was not one of integration. The use of the prefix ‘de-’ has