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Over the past five decades Michael Fordham has evolved a model of the mind congruent with Jung's attitude to the psyche while being radically different in its understanding of maturation and development. It is particularly Jungian in that it places intuition, described by Jung as ‘the matrix out of which thinking and feeling develop as rational functions’ (Jung 25) in the centre of the analyst's mental activity, intuition which is checked against the evidence in the dreams and clinical material of the analysis. This approach values the irrational fact as an aid to the advancement of understanding and knowledge.
Central to Jung's model of the mind is the idea that there is an individual self which is the totality of psyche and soma. The symbols of the self also function in an organising way within archetypal forms. Like Jung, Fordham values abstractions as instruments in the development of knowledge. The concept of the original self was just such an abstraction, later developed into a hypothesis and then found to be a fact (see Fordham, 7, 9, 13). Fordham's work on the psychic reality of the symbols of the self (Fordham 7, 13) has led to his being able to trace the connections between ‘individuation’ in childhood and its adult form described by Jung as:
The process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated. In particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore is a process of differentiation having for its goal the development of the individual personality (Jung 25).
Fordham maintains that the depressive position (Klein 34, 35) is an early step in individuation. His work on this has a central feature, thinking about emotional conflict. This is a route full of pain, but also meaning, which is contained in the emotion. It recognises, in my view, that thoughts and feelings originate in the unconscious, that emotion is the meaning of experience and that our crea