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.
The theme of this book connects especially with Fordham's developments of Jung's
theories of the self. Other sources drawn on include particularly Klein and Bion. After a brief, useful account of the background the author gives a very condensed exposition of relevant theory. Readers who are not familiar with at least some of the work of Fordham might find this difficult; they should not be put off from reading the rest of the book, in which the exposition is broadened and brought alive in extensive and interesting material—both clinical and from the observation of infants and their mothers. Fordham's theory of the primal self, deintegration, and reintegration is central and forms a nucleus around which the other models cluster and cohere: one does not get the impression of a conglomeration.
The author's use of theory has a free quality and she seems comfortable with it; it enlivens her descriptions of clinical and infant observation material. Sometimes it leads to formulations which provoke critical questioning: for example (p. 5), ‘According to Fordham's theory, ego fragments—that is to say, “deintegrates and the primal self”’. Can deintegrates and the primal self really be thought of as ego fragments?
Mara Sidoli trained with the Society of Analytical Psychology in London, in both child analysis and adult analysis, and played a major part especially in the child analytic training before leaving to continue her work in Santa Fé. In this book she particularly applies and extends the insights developed by Fordham from his work with children and adults. There is a good deal of material from observation of infants and their mothers in which the idea of deintegration-reintegration is applied in a most interesting way to the infant-mother interaction. Here Mara Sidoli shows her strong feeling for the need, for the purpose of healthy development, of a freely functioning, rhythmical alternation between the two sides of the process. In an account of observations of a small