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This is an important book for Jungian child psychotherapists and for many others; I shall suggest later which others might find it valuable.
There are fifteen chapters. The content of some of them will be familiar to readers of this Journal; seven chapters are reprinted from Journal papers, but amended. But to re-read these papers in the setting of the whole book will add to the understanding of them. With the other papers, the helpful preface, and the substantial introduction, the volume presents a remarkably coherent whole. For this the editors must be thanked. They state clearly the nature of the core of theory and practice around which the exposition of the work develops: this nucleus is the work of Michael Fordham. One of the aims of the book is ‘to pay tribute to Fordham's creative and pioneering work in the field of Jungian child psychotherapy’ and much of it is explicitly based on that work.
In the Introduction James Astor presents an elegant summary both of Fordham's main theories relating to children and of their development from Jung's limited accounts of his own ideas about children. The introduction complements Fordham's chapter on ‘The emergence of child analysis’ (published in this Journal in 1980). Much of the rest of the book carries on the clarification and development of Fordham's work and illustrates its clinical application.
In a collection of papers of this sort there is an inevitable tendency for each author to restate the basic theory underlying his personal presentation. There are accordingly repeated, simple accounts of archetypal theory and of Fordham's main theoretical propositions, especially the concepts of primary identity and of deintegration and reintegration. This does not detract from the value of the book because the different phrasing and settings of the statements can help to clarify concepts which have often been imperfectly understood. Astor, for example, usefully relates deintegration/reintegration to the ideas of Piaget, the et