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This book takes its place in the series ‘Makers of Modern Psychotherapy’. What are Fordham's credentials for such a title?
C. G. Jung created in analytical psychology both a treatment method and a hypothetical developmental theory based on the self and archetypes, most important of which is the pre-oedipal, dual-aspect mother archetype (roughly comparable to Klein's good/bad breast). But, apart from one or two exceptions, Jung did not write about children as children; only the child-within-the-adult. Fordham's task was to study children and find out what stood up to observation and what did not. This was at a time when Jung did not consider child analysis effective. As he famously said to Fordham, ‘If a child was brought to him, he got the mother by the ears (p. 50)’. For Jung, individuation (ie the process whereby the individual differentiates himself from the collective psychology) was an activity of the second half of life. Fordham early on recognised that it is a life-long action, beginning in utero; and he pursued Jung's other view of individuation as ‘development of consciousness out of the original state of identity.’ He was intensely loyal to Jung since his first meeting in the 1930s.
Fordham's own contribution began in the 1940s, when he postulated a primary self, an integrate, out of which were differentiated psyche and soma, conscious and unconscious. The self was seen to play an active part in the formations of mental structures. From the late 1970s, Fordham participated in mother-infant observation seminars that he had set up at the Society of Analytical Psychology and found that what had started as a ‘speculative hypothesis acquired characteristics of fact (p. 56).
James Astor's admirable book has needed to be written for over twenty years, for there has been no introduction to Fordham's work. Had it been written so long ago, however, the evidence for Fordham's hypothesis would have been patchy. Nor would it have included his work on defences of the self