Fordham, Jung and the self: a re‐examination of Fordham's contribution to Jung's conceptualization of the self

Abstract

This paper is about Fordham's contribution to Jung's studies on the self. It opens with the epistemological dilemmas inherent in the subject, before moving on to an account of Fordham's research into the incompatible ways Jung used the term 'self'. There is a description of Fordham's model, which covers his concepts of the primary self, deintegration, reintegration, self objects, self representations, and individuation in infancy. There is a section which discusses areas in which Fordham apparently diverged from Jung, including how these were reconciled by Fordham's developmental approach. These areas include the definition of the self as totality or archetype, the mind-body relationship, the 'ultimate', the origins of the archetypes, and the primary self, the self and the sense of self. It concludes with an extension to Fordham's outline of a resolution to Jung's incompatible definitions. This draws upon the concept of the central archetype of order and how its unfolding is evidenced towards the end of the first year of infancy.

‘Divinity expresses the self …’ An investigation

“…If die Göttlichkeit is only a reference to an extra‐egoic psychological force—a living and dynamic factor, as Jung stresses above—and indeed exclusively and without remainder refers to the most elemental and all encompassing force that humans are capable of experiencing, imagining, conceiving, and projecting, i.e., the ultimate God image, this would reduce—i.e., confine—it to the psychological , the archetype of the self. And the self is in Jung's view exactly such an ultimate ‘central archetype of order’ (Urban 2005) and clearly in his view too a coincidentia oppositorum . The monotheistic God image—provided it is not rendered insufficient and one‐sided by idealizing defences, or is simply the one God image that manages to gain priority and pre‐eminence from among a plethora of them—is precisely such an inclusive figure, and therefore a representative image of the self archetype.…”

“…The situation for the infant and the young child, where the ego is practically non‐existent as yet, was explained by Michael Fordham, and brilliantly explicated by Elizabeth Urban in her paper, ‘Fordham, Jung and the self’, where she writes: ‘Fordham had not postulated a primary self simply in order to account for the sense of self. It was to account for the fundamental unity of the infant before an ego is formed’ (Urban 2005, p. 586). Thus the self accounts for the unity of the personality before the ego is formed as well as for its unity as a whole after ego formation and development have taken place.…”

The ‘self’ in analytical psychology: the function of the ‘central archetype’ within Fordham's model

“…As a deintegrate out of which the ego develops, the central archetype provides a link between early ego development and the primary self. Locating the emergence of its early phenomena at the end of the first year marks the closing of what I have elsewhere considered to be the period of the primary self, and the early beginnings of psychic phenomena, including symbolization, which were the data of Jung's work (Urban 2005). This link preserves Fordham's view, following Jung, that the individual self is woven into the whole fabric of one's life.…”

On being, knowing and having a self

“…It was for this reason that I suggested in a previous paper that the self could be thought of as the overall process of the psyche (Colman 2000). Since then, Elizabeth Urban has questioned the definition of the self as a psychic totality, drawing on Damasio's proposal that psychic life arises through the registration of bodily states, particularly emotions (Urban 2005, p. 581). I would now strongly endorse her view that the self needs to be thought of as a psychosomatic unity and so I would now want to say that the self is the overall process of the organism as a whole.…”

“…In this sense, the primary self is to be regarded as prior to either the mind or the body, the integrated state out of which both emerge via deintegration. If, as Urban puts it, ‘structures, including body, mind and the structures and processes of each unfold out of the primary self’ (Urban 2005, p. 583), this raises profound questions about its ontological status. Either it is a purely abstract heuristic concept, required to provide some theoretical grounding for the process of deintegration, or it is a Platonic Idea, an a priori template out of which the phenomenal reality of a baby with a developing body, brain and mind can ‘deintegrate’.…”