Deintegration Reintegration

Fordham reserves the term splitting for disintegrative experiences that are pathological and threaten to overwhelm the infant or adult. He preferred instead the idea of deintegration and reintegration to describe the dynamic process whereby the primary self reac

This passage articulates Fordham’s defining terminological and conceptual distinction: deintegration-reintegration names the healthy, cyclical developmental process of the primary self, in explicit contrast to Kleinian splitting, which denotes pathological fragmentation.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009thesis

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F. sees a process of continual development. This is based on deintegration-reintegration movements as the various archetypal

Samuels identifies Fordham’s model of continual development as fundamentally structured by deintegration-reintegration movements, contrasting it sharply with Neumann’s stage-based mythological progression.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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reintegration involves sleep or sleepy states of quietude. Reintegration is a time when the infant needs to feel separate as he assimilates and digests the exciting deintegrative process. He will react negatively to invasions of his privacy.

Samuels details the phenomenology of both poles of the cycle: deintegration involves bodily excitation and outward engagement, while reintegration requires withdrawal, assimilation, and protection from intrusion.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Fordham prefers to conceive the self not as an archetype, but as beyond archetypes and ego, which are then seen as arising out of or ‘deintegrating’ from the self.

Samuels shows how deintegration functions as an ontological principle in Fordham’s theory, resolving a contradiction in Jung by grounding both ego and archetypes as products of the self’s deintegrative activity rather than co-ordinate structures.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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idealisation) and, especially, from deintegration of the self. In brief, the post-Jungian contribution is a model which can incorporate innate potentials, inner processes and external objects, using both a subjective and an objective perspective.

Samuels positions deintegration of the self as a key source of psychopathological phenomena within the post-Jungian synthesis, linking it to a broader model that integrates innate potentials with environmental responsiveness.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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REINTEGRATION AS AUFHEBUNG I have expressed this reintegration in terms of a ‘return’ to the right hemisphere. This risks suggesting that the achievements of the left hemisphere’s interventions are lost or nullified

McGilchrist invokes reintegration — understood as Hegelian Aufhebung rather than Fordhamian developmental cycle — to describe how the right hemisphere receives and elevates, rather than simply cancels, the left hemisphere’s analytic work.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

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