Michael Fordham

Michael Fordham was the London Jungian analyst who, beside and against the classical Zurich school, founded what came to be called the Developmental School of analytical psychology. His originality lay in applying Jungian concepts to childhood analysis — a territory Jung himself had largely left to others — and in reformulating the theory of the Self to account for its operation from birth onward.

Fordham’s central theoretical contribution is the concept of the primary self: the totality present at the beginning of life, out of which the ego crystallizes through cycles of deintegration and reintegration. This rework of the Jungian Self made possible a Jungian developmental psychology that could meet the Kleinian and object-relations schools on shared ground without surrendering the archetypal level. He served as founding editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and as general editor of Jung‘s Collected Works in English. His contribution to the Seba lineage is the bridge between classical Jung and British psychoanalysis — the current on which much of the post-Jungian literature travels. See also ego-self-axis.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• developmental-school
• ego-self-axis