Correspondence

I was Most Interested in James Astor's comment on my paper on deintegration because he has picked up on the one point, my doubts about the original self, with which Fordham has expressed his disagreement to me. In a private communication he stated that in his postulate of an original self, which he sees as an intellectual necessity, there is no assumption as to whether the self is undifferentiated or not. He does not think that either assumption is required of an integrate. But as Astor rightly points out, Fordham is in no doubt that the infant is a whole from the start, an individual separate from the mother. His emphasis on this, which distinguishes his point of view from traditional psychoanalytic theorising, including Winnicott, is indeed borne out by a mass of data from infant observation and I totally agree with him. Astor, quite naturally concludes from such passages in Fordham's writings that Fordham does imply that the newborn integrated baby is also differentiated, not only from the mother but that he has various parts (such as psyche and soma) which are integrated to form a unity.

The difficulty in this position is to understand how these differentiated parts came into existence in the first place. It is at this point that the concept of deintegration comes in useful in its formulation of spontaneous division as expressed in creation myths. But this can be used as an explanation only if the process is taken back far enough to some original undifferentiated state. Such a state is indeed presupposed in the myths, but the intellectual necessity required by Fordham cannot be attributed to the highly differentiated nconate. It may be that it has an existence before birth, but even the germ cells are highly differentiated so that one would have to go back to the earliest beginnings of the universe to find it. Could such a state, whether mythically imagined or theoretically posited be properly called a ‘self’?

The existence of a self at birth implies to me some su