You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper Astor gives us a portrait of Michael Fordham and describes his main contributions to analytical psychology. Fordham first studied medicine at Cambridge and London, and only after a failed attempt in neurology did he turn to psychiatry. Analysed by H. G. Baynes, he moved to the London Child Guidance Clinic, where he developed his growing interest in Jung and in child analysis and, later, the analysis of the child in the adult. He explored a Jungian concept of the self in infancy and conceptualised a primal self in an infant as developing through phases of deintegration and reintegration, in normal and pathological states, particularly in autism. He next moved to the study of psychoanalysis, especially Klein, paralleling her concept of primitive unconscious fantasies with Jung's archetypes. He showed that scientific method could be used to investigate both the individual and collective unconscious. He explored the issue of technique in the context of Jung's apparently unsystematic approach to patients and his concept of the vas bene clausum.
In the analytic process, Fordham stressed the role of the analyst's unconscious and the importance of the analyst's analysis in the recognition and use of the syntonic countertransference. He studied the link between the analyst's pathological reaction and his personal attitude towards his patient's transference, and described the transformation processes in analyst and patient in their dialectic interactions, such as identification, projection, introjection. For him, countertransference is the analyst's inability to transform and therefore to integrate the complex information given by the patient, and to return it in such a way that the patient can effect his/her own transformation.
In 1946, with six other analysts, Fordham founded the Society of Analytical Psychology, with Jung as its first president. Fordham played a crucial role in its development, criticising what he thought was the Zürich school's worship of Jung