the development of the later ego-Self axis of the psyche and the communication and opposition between ego and Self are initiated by the relationship between mother as Self and the child as ego. (1973, p. 17) What Neumann has done is to develop the proposition that the baby/ego separates from the mother/self. Fordham (1981) has pointed out that, if self means the totality, there would then be no baby. Or, viewed from another angle, if the mother is the baby's self, there would be no mother. Fordham feels that all he can accept is that to the baby, his mother is a part of the self (1976, p. 54). This difference of opinion between Fordham and Neumann may be seen as part of a wider divide between empirical, scientific approaches to the study of infancy as distinct from those based on metaphor and empathy. Neumann's idea that the mother carries the baby's self links with modern psychoanalytic theorising about the importance of mirroring, and the whole issue is detailed in the next chapter. In terms of the post-Jungian debate about integration and pluralism, Neumann's conception of the self follows Jung's rather than leading to an idea of a polycentric psyche, whereas Fordham's approach, as we saw, permits of more variety. This issue of the mother functioning as the baby's self, as opposed to the baby's self deintegrating in relation to the mother, raises a good deal of heat in analytical psychology. Newton and Redfearn make two useful bridging suggestions. First, images that appear in clinical material of the mother-infant relationship do symbolise the relations between the self and the ego: just as the self initiates, comprehends and transcends zonal drives and part-object relations, so, if all goes well, the quiet 'holding' mother initiates the feeding relationship and sustains and supports her infant through the vicissitudes of the emotional conflict associated with his oral drive, through her capacity to keep in touch with him as a 'whole person'. (1977, p. 299) From this general connection between self activity stemming from within and maternal activity stemming from without, a second, more precise parallel can be drawn. Inner feelings of harmony and purpose (experiences of the self) can be envisioned as internalisations of the maternal environment and especially the presence and 'feel' of the mother (ibid., p. 310). An analogy would be with the way the personality of a head teacher permeates a school. The individual's ego-self position reflects what has transpired between him and his mother.
— Andrew Samuels
Neumann and Fordham are not simply disagreeing about developmental theory — they are disagreeing about what the self is allowed to mean. Neumann wants the mother to carry the totality; Fordham points out that if she does, the baby logically cannot exist as a separate entity at all. The correction is technically correct and psychologically costly, because what Neumann was reaching toward — even if the metaphysics won't hold — is something clinicians keep rediscovering: that the earliest experience of cohesion does not feel like it originates inside. It arrives from outside and is only gradually, incompletely, relocated.
Newton and Redfearn's bridging move is the most useful thing in this passage. When they describe inner feelings of harmony and purpose as internalisations of the maternal environment, they are saying that what we later call "the self" — that felt sense of being gathered, held, purposeful — is not a given but a deposit. It was once the mother's actual presence. The quiet holding preceded the quiet interior. This means that anyone for whom that holding was absent, disrupted, or conditional faces a specific predicament: the interior does not go quiet on its own, because the model for quietness was never sufficiently installed. The search for being held enough — in a relationship, a tradition, a practice, a substance — is not regression; it is the soul still trying to complete an acquisition that was interrupted before it could be made permanent.
Andrew Samuels·Jung and the Post-Jungians·1985