Are Urban and Colman Really in Opposition over Fordham's Model of the Self?

In the edition of the Journal devoted to the self there are seeming incompatibilities between the points of view of Warren Colman and Elizabeth Urban with regard to Fordham's contribution to theorizing and description of the self and its actions (Vol. 53, 3, ). Urban carefully rehabilitates an idea of Fordham's, which he did not develop, that there was a central archetype, which one could identify as being the archetype present in the development of the ego out of the self. This is well argued and linked to physical changes in the brain and to the development of the awareness of the minds of others. The language of this article could lead one to think that the presence of something called a central archetype (at best a hypothetical structure for ordering our observations along Jungian lines) is an actual entity, a blueprint which sets patterns for development. This is a canard. Archetype theory is moving towards the theory of emergence. Archetypal patterns can only be safely understood in the light of modern knowledge (some of which is cited by Colman and some by Urban) by abandoning ideas of a priori structures unfolding patterns of behaviour. Instead one needs to combine concepts such as maternal reverie and emergence to arrive at a contemporary understanding of archetypal patterns of behaviour in infancy and childhood. Both authors recognize this.

But Colman states that ‘if we regard the psyche as a self-organizing system, the totality of which constitutes the self, there is no need to postulate a separate archetypal ‘principle of organization’… (p. 353). So if Colman's self-organizing principle is the dominant developmental factor, then the development of the ego follows on from the ‘knowing’ of the self which occurs in the triangulations of developments when the newborn meets the minds of others and discovers he has a mind of his own. Put very simply, Colman suggests that because the other thinks of the baby as having a mind, the baby starts to think of itself a