The Developmental School

The second of the three post-Jungian schools as named by Samuels in Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985). The Developmental School weights theoretical priorities in the order development, self, archetype, and clinical priorities with transference-countertransference first (Samuels 1985, pp. 12–13). It is the school born of the “fertile interchange” with Kleinian psychoanalysis, and Samuels corresponds it to Fordham’s “London School” and Adler’s “neo-Jungians” (Fordham 1978a, p. 53, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 11).

Its representative figures — Michael Fordham, Plaut, Lambert, Gordon, Redfearn — developed the concepts of the primary-self, deintegration and reintegration, the permeable ego (Plaut), the six styles of ego functioning (Lambert), and the defences of the self (Fordham). Samuels summarises the school’s clinical method as “interactional dialectic” (ID), following Fordham’s phrase, and notes that “these ideas on countertransference, though formulated largely by the Developmental School, are influential throughout contemporary analytical psychology” (Samuels 1985, pp. 189, 191).

The school’s signature move was to take Jung’s inadequately codified theory of early development and elaborate it in conversation with Klein, Winnicott, and the British object-relations tradition — without, Fordham insisted, making Jungian analysis incompatible with its Freudian cousin (Fordham 1978a, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 11).

Relationships

• classical-school
• archetypal-school
• transference-countertransference
• primary-self

Primary sources

• samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985)