Primary Self

The primary Self is Michael Fordham‘s term for the psychic totality present at the beginning of life — the original condition from which, through cycles of deintegration and reintegration, the ego gradually crystallizes across the developmental arc of infancy and childhood. The concept is Fordham’s principal theoretical contribution and the foundational idea of the developmental-school of analytical psychology.

Against the Zurich-classical reading in which the Self appears as an end-term of individuation — the figure toward which the second half of life is oriented — Fordham insisted that the Self is present from the start and operates developmentally from the beginning. Each deintegrative act of the primary Self (the infant reaching out, encountering, responding) produces a fragment of experience that is then taken back into the Self and re-integrated, and by this rhythm the ego emerges. The clinical implications — that Jungian work with children is possible, that developmental arrest can be read archetypally, that the analyst’s attunement to the infantile transference matters Jungianly — are the ones the developmental tradition has elaborated since. See michael-fordham and developmental-school.

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• michael-fordham
• self
• developmental-school