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In a lively and personal article, originally delivered as a paper to the British Association of Psychotherapy, Jacoby delivers a clear and informative account of Jung's concept of the Self in relation to the ego, not failing to discuss its complexities as
well as its antecedents in influences from Jung's own personality. He distinguishes these concepts, furthermore, from the psychoanalytic use of the terms.
Jacoby notes that Jung was not very interested in developmental processes of the Self, and that Michael Fordham filled in some of the gaps with his own concepts of psychic development in infancy, while Neumann grappled with issues of the development of consciousness. It is here that Jacoby begins to indicate his individual perspective in bringing Fordham, Neumann and Winnicott together in relation to the same idea by selecting a concept Fordham has long repudiated, that of ‘mother-infant unity’. The distinctions between Fordham, Neumann and Winnicott are important, Fordham in particular emphasizing, as he has for many years, the striking evidence for the infant's experience of self and object differentiation right from the inception of deintegration/reintegration processes. This latter view of infancy, drawing strongly on infant observation, is far from the ideas of Kohut that Jacoby goes on to detail. Yet the distinctions are of major consideration in the practice and the theory of analysis.
Jacoby notes that the concern with maturational processes and the importance of the object/environment in developmental theory has led to the emphasis on transference and countertransference in the practice of analytical psychology. He comments that Jung himself had astonishing insights about transference-countertransference processes. Indeed, this was a lifelong interest of Jung's which Fordham surveyed twenty years ago (Fordham 1974). Jacoby's own position seems ambivalent, mentioning first that his style is ‘closely related to Jung's’ who he states ‘made very little use o