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The publication of Michael Fordham's latest book has taken place very appropriately in the year of his eightieth birthday and celebrates but one more stage of the line of development in a thinker who is as exploratory as he is well rooted in the past; who is as innovative as mindful of first principles; and as creative as he is able to dismantle viewpoints that are ceasing to carry significance or value for us. That Fordham, after some fifty years of analytic practice, should produce a major book on the Jungian self seems wholly timely in the light of his many contributions in the past to theory and practice in that area. The present book amplifies that work and collects it together in one volume, and, with the addition of one quite new essay (chapter three), provides some material for the historical understanding of the subject's development.
The book divides into three parts. The first deals with the empirical foundations of the concept of the self (pp. 5-54). This entailed, in the first instance, his making a card index of Jung's statements about the self in order to distinguish between the central and peripheral elements of the theory. Out of that study two main themes emerged—that of the self understood as a totality or whole, and that of the central archetype engaged in the ordering of its dynamism. Furthermore, he indicates certain elements that should be taken into account in any critical appraisal of Jung's theory (p. 15ff.) and adds a survey of the sort of evidence from affective experience that can be adduced to support it (pp. 29 & 30). In my view we cannot ascribe too much importance to the subject and to the phenomenology and understanding of it, for the Jungian self appears to puzzle many people and yet remains not only central for Jungians but also, in many ways, distinct from other views of the self.
It is in Part One, Chapter 3, that Fordham exposes in detail the beginnings in infancy of the processes connected with his, by now well-known but not alw