Conjugating the Self

James Astor has discerned what he considers to be not an actual, but rather an apparent misunderstanding between Warren Colman and myself in our respective papers in the special Journal edition on the self (Journal of Analytical Psychology, 53, 3, ). The substance of his commentary is that Colman interprets the view of Fordham and myself to be that the primary self has, a priori, ‘a blueprint which sets patterns for development’ (see Astor 2009 in this issue, p. 395). Astor considers that this is a matter of linguistic rather than conceptual differences, and that this is due to the way Fordham and I discuss the concept of the primary self; that is, we describe it in a way that can imply that it has structures and contents a priori, although it is hardly the case that Fordham and I conceive this to be so. I agree with Astor that the differences he cites are primarily apparent, and express my appreciation for his insight into this. I would also like to restate some of Astor's points from my own position and add some of my own thoughts.

Firstly, Fordham was staunchly against the notion of innate images and contents. The idea seems to derive from Jung's idea of the self as ‘an a priori existent’ (Jung 1954, para. 391), but became distorted into the misconception that the infant self is ‘filled’ a priori with an archetype-rich unconscious, which is projected onto the mother. This was Fordham's argument with Neumann, and the vehemence of his objection comes through in his paper, ‘Neumann and childhood’ (Fordham 1981).

Colman, Jean Knox, myself and other contemporary developmental Jungians view infant development to be interactive and emergent - as did Fordham. In 1937 he wrote:

I have attempted to develop the idea that there is a constant interplay between the child and its own world on the one hand and the world of parents and teachers and adults generally on the other. It is through this interplay that the child develops.

Secondly, as for emergence, For