Correspondence

In the Enjoyable Michael-Fordham-reviewed edition of the Journal Louis Zinkin writes that Michael Fordham's ‘original self’—‘seems to be quite undifferentiated’. And he continues that he ‘cannot accept that there is an original self’. ‘I can agree with it,’ he writes, ‘only as a postulate like initial conditions in system theory language but would regard such a state as preceding the birth of the individual’.

The Winnicottian idea that the original self is undifferentiated is not one that Michael Fordham subscribes to, and his expressed views on the original self are based on Jung's concept of entelechy, that is of an ‘a priori existence of potential wholeness’. He differs from Jung, however, in that he conceives of the ‘a priori wholeness as the actual state of an infant’. The importance of the psychosomatic unity of the original self is in Fordham's view that ‘without it a basis is lacking for the persistent recurrence of integrative states that form the root pattern for the infant's growing independence of the mother’.

This statement from Fordham is extended and developed in the third chapter of his recent book, Explorations into the Self. In this chapter Fordham describes the impact of infant observation on his proposition, ‘that an infant could be considered as starting from being integrated—a person distinct from his mother’, and how his theory of deintegration gives meaning to these observations.