Michael Scott Montague Fordham (4 August 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an English child psychiatrist and
Jungian analyst. He was a co-editor of the English translation of
C.G. Jung's
Collected Works. His clinical and theoretical collaboration with
psychoanalysts
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might be ...
of the
object relations school led him to make significant theoretical contributions to what has become known as 'The London School' of
analytical psychology
Analytical psychology ( de , Analytische Psychologie, sometimes translated as analytic psychology and referred to as Jungian analysis) is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" ...
in marked contrast to the approach of the
C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich. His pioneering research into infancy and childhood led to a new understanding of the self and its relations with the ego. Part of Fordham's legacy is to have shown that the self in its unifying characteristics can transcend the apparently opposing forces that congregate in it and that while engaged in the struggle, it can be exceedingly disruptive both destructively and creatively.
Fordham was instrumental in founding the
Society of Analytical Psychology
The Society of Analytical Psychology, known also as the SAP, incorporated in London, England, in 1945 is the oldest training organisation for Jungian analysts in the United Kingdom. Its first Honorary President in 1946 was Carl Jung. The Societ ...
, London, in 1946 and a founder of the ''
Journal of Analytical Psychology'', the foremost journal in the field, of which he was editor for 15 years from 1955.
Background and education
The second son of
Montague Edward Fordham and his wife Sara Gertrude Worthington, Fordham was born in
Kensington, London and was educated at
Gresham's School
Gresham's School is a public school (English independent day and boarding school) in Holt, Norfolk, England, one of the top thirty International Baccalaureate schools in England.
The school was founded in 1555 by Sir John Gresham as a free ...
,
Holt, Norfolk
Holt is a market town, civil parish and electoral ward in the English county of Norfolk. The town is north of the city of Norwich, west of Cromer and east of King's Lynn. The town has a population of 3,550, rising and including the ward to ...
(1918–1923), where in 1924 Fordham played Don Adriano in a Gresham's School performance of ''
Love's Labour's Lost
''Love's Labour's Lost'' is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as ...
''. In 1920 his mother died. From then on, Fordham was mentored by a friend of the family,
Helton Godwin Baynes
Helton Godwin Baynes, also known as ‘Peter’ Baynes (26 June 1882, Hampstead – 6 September 1943), was an English physician, army officer, analytical psychologist and author, who was a friend and early translator into English of Carl Jung.
...
, who would later influence the young man's career path.
He went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
(1924-1927) to read
Natural science. For his clinical training he attended
St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College (1927-1932). He took the degrees of
MB and
BCh in 1931, and became an
MRCP in 1932.
Family
In 1928, Fordham married Molly Swabey, and their son,
Max was born in 1933. In 1940, their marriage was dissolved and he married, secondly,
Frieda Hoyle, a social worker and later also an analyst.
Career
On completing his medical qualification in 1932, Fordham's first post was as a House Officer (Junior Medical Officer) at
Long Grove Mental Hospital in
Epsom
Epsom is the principal town of the Borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, England, about south of central London. The town is first recorded as ''Ebesham'' in the 10th century and its name probably derives from that of a Saxon landowner. ...
, Surrey. The following year he began to read
Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phil ...
's writings. In 1934 he was appointed as a registrar in Child Psychiatry, London Child Guidance Clinic. The same year he entered into a personal analysis with
H. G. Baynes and visited
Zurich to meet Jung, intending to train with him. He was disappointed in this quest and returned to London. In 1935 he began a year as a
General Practitioner in
Barking, Essex and terminated his analysis with Baynes and switched to the Jung-trained, Hilde Kirsch, married to another Jungian, James Kirsch, the couple having moved to England to escape
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
. Also in 1936, he took up a part-time consultant's post at a
Child Guidance
Child Guidance was both an evolving 20th-century social construct, sometimes called the Child Guidance Movement, and an influential network of multidisciplinary clinics set up to address the problems of childhood and adolescence. It began in the U ...
clinic in
Nottingham
Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...
, in the
Midlands
The Midlands (also referred to as Central England) are a part of England that broadly correspond to the Mercia, Kingdom of Mercia of the Early Middle Ages, bordered by Wales, Northern England and Southern England. The Midlands were important in ...
. At the out-break of the
Second world war
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, he remained in Nottingham, and his marriage came to an end by 1940. Also in 1940, his analyst Hildegard Kirsch, emigrated to the United States.
[
In 1942 a new phase of his life began. He married his second wife, and was appointed consultant psychiatrist to evacuated children in the Nottingham area. In 1943 his long-time mentor and friend, Peter Baynes, died.][ In 1945 he became a co-editor of English translation of C. G. Jung's ''Collected Works'' for the publishing houses of ]Routledge & Kegan Paul
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, a ...
and Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent Academic publishing, publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, ...
. Later that year, he became a co-founder with seven colleagues, of the Society of Analytical Psychology
The Society of Analytical Psychology, known also as the SAP, incorporated in London, England, in 1945 is the oldest training organisation for Jungian analysts in the United Kingdom. Its first Honorary President in 1946 was Carl Jung. The Societ ...
– SAP – in London.[ In the 1970s he would also finally establish a separate Jungian training for analysts wishing to specialise in work with children and adolescents.
With the move back to the capital, he took up the post of Consultant to the Child Guidance Clinic at the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases. In 1947 he obtained the Degree of MD. He continued the monumental work of editing Jung's then published works that eventually grew to 20 volumes, and kept up a correspondence with Jung, sometimes needing to be extremely diplomatic in tackling 'inconsistencies'.
Throughout the next decades he ran a private analytic practice and had a role in the ]Tavistock Clinic
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health trust based in north London. The Trust specialises in talking therapies. The education and training department caters for 2,000 students a year from the United Kin ...
teaching trainees involved in baby observations. He lectured and wrote papers and books. With his wife he played a pivotal role in training the next generation of Jungian analysts and making major theoretical contributions. In 1971 he was honoured by becoming a Founder Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, and is responsible for representing psychiatrists, for psychiatric research and for providing public information about mental health ...
.
The London-Zurich split
The 1970s were marked by increased tensions over the theoretical direction the SAP should take. Two camps developed: the one led by Jung disciple and refugee from Germany, Gerhard Adler, who promoted the Archetypal school, aligned to classical teaching and the other, led by Fordham, who had been declined by Jung and who impressed upon trainees and younger colleagues, the discipline of the psychoanalytic 'Independent Group', who laid great stress on examining early child development in the analysis of adults and working with the transference
Transference (german: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the "feelings, attitudes, or desires" a person had about one thing are subconsciously projected onto the here-and-now Other. It usually concerns feelings from ...
. Until Fordham's systematic approach to this area, Jung's intuitions on the subject had not been followed up at the Zurich Institute, ''pace'' the Swiss 'lay' analyst, Dora Kalff who ran with Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld's idea of engaging children in diagnostic sandplay. These differences proved organisationally, and personally insuperable, and Adler and his supporters left the SAP to form an alternative organisation in 1977.
Fordham was inspired by Jung, but was not a ''Jungian''. This nuance was expressed in Fordham's text on the occasion of Jung's death in 1961:
:''His name is still automatically linked with that of Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...
as most nearly Freud's equal, and if his main life's work was in the end to be founded on a personal and scientific incompatibility with Freud, there are those who believe, like myself, that this was a disaster, and in part an illusion, from which we suffer and will continue to do so until we have repaired the damage. ..the best monument that can be raised to Jung's memory is to make use of and develop his work rather than let it be passively accepted and sterilised.''
Later years
After the death in 1988 of his second wife, Frieda (Hoyle, née Rothwell), Fordham moved to a Quaker community in Chalfont St Peter
Chalfont St Peter is a large village and civil parish in southeastern Buckinghamshire, England. It is in a group of villages called The Chalfonts which also includes Chalfont St Giles and Little Chalfont. The villages lie between High Wycombe ...
Buckinghamshire, where he continued a small practice, welcomed visitors and followed cricket. He died there on 14 April 1995, in his 90th year.
Fordham's theoretical contributions
The ''primary self''
In 1947 Fordham proposed a distinct theory of the ''primary self'' to describe the state of the psyche of neonates, characterised by homeostasis, or 'steady state' as he calls it, where self and other are undifferentiated, where there is no distinction between the internal and external world, and where there are as yet no different components in the internal world. This idea Fordham derived partly from the Jungian concept of the archetype of the self, and the psychoanalytic idea of internal 'objects'. The primary self, taken as the original totality of each person, with its 'archetypal' tendencies to develop aspects, such as language, etc., enters into relation with the external world through a dual process of ''de-integration'' and ''re-integration''.
De-integration and re-integration
Fordham coined the term ''deintegration'' - as opposed to disintegration - to denote a state akin to the Kleinian depressive position, where, as a result of a sense of major ruptures, or loss of contact with feeling fed and contained, a deep sense of disappearance, perhaps even of non-being ensues. However, this is usually temporary until the next feed or contact with mother restores the sense of 'one-ness' and well-being and hence, 're-integration'. The swings between these two extreme states is a form of Enantiodromia Enantiodromia ( grc, ἐνάντιος, enantios – "opposite" and δρόμος, ''dromos'' – "running course") is a principle introduced in the West by psychiatrist Carl Jung. In '' Psychological Types'', Jung defines enantiodromia as "the emerg ...
in Jungian terms. In the case of a baby it corresponds to a pattern of experiencing a need, feeling 'disappointment' until it is stemmed, and 'satisfaction' when the basic needs are more, or less, successfully met. These experiences in turn activate the inherent internal 'archetypal' dynamics of the baby's perceptions and expectations and so begin the foundations of the person's internal and social development, through a more or less unconscious process of adaptation and learning. The baby's posited initial 'sense' of wholeness with mother is thus subjected to different levels of turbulence and there is a necessary experience of loss of that wholeness as the baby grows in awareness of being separate from mother (and the outer world) during this process. With the entry into infancy the child has to struggle with the extent and limitations of his will (agency) and power over his environment and learn to contend with internal images and sense impressions that now populate the mind and senses. It is also the time when pathways are established for the future formation of complexes, when reactions to certain stimuli remain trapped in the unconscious. This stage is sometimes popularly characterised as 'the terrible twos'. Inklings of self-awareness may also come into this early process. The process itself continues into adult life.Kenneth Lambert's exposition of the theory, (accessed 25 May 2019)
/ref>
Publications
His publications include:
*''The Life of Childhood'', London: Routledge (1944)
*''New Developments in Analytical Psychology'' (1957)
*''The Objective Psyche'' (1958)
*''Children as Individuals'', London: Hodder & Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hachette.
History
Early history
The firm has its origins in the 1840s, with Matthew Hodder's employment, aged 14, with Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official publishe ...
(1969, revised from The Life of Childhood)
*''The Self and Autism'' (1976)
* ''Jungian Psychotherapy'' (1978) London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
*''The Making of an Analyst: a memoir'' (London: Free Association Books
Free Association Books is a project started in London in the 1980s. Bob Young and colleagues began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation. Other people became involved in the movement such as Andrew Samuels and B ...
, 1993)
From 1945, Fordham was co-editor of the English translation of '' The Collected Works of C. G. Jung''.
From 1955 to 1970 he was editor of the ''Journal of Analytical Psychology''
In Memoriam
The Michael Fordham Prize, is awarded for exceptionally innovative articles submitted to the ''Journal of Analytical Psychology''.
Bibliography
*''The Making of an Analyst: a memoir'' by Michael Fordham (London, Free Association Books
Free Association Books is a project started in London in the 1980s. Bob Young and colleagues began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation. Other people became involved in the movement such as Andrew Samuels and B ...
, 1993)
*Obituary Notice of Michael Fordham in ''Journal of Analytical Psychology'', volume 40, No. 3, pp. 430–431
*Obituary in The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publishe ...
, 25 April 1995
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References
External links
Papers of Michael Fordham at wellcome.ac.uk
Michael Fordham on the Society of Analytical Psychology website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fordham, Michael Scott Montague
1905 births
1995 deaths
British child psychiatrists
People from Kensington
English psychiatrists
Jungian psychologists
People educated at Gresham's School
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Fellows of the British Psychological Society
20th-century British medical doctors
Epistemologists
20th-century psychologists
Positive psychologists
British cognitive scientists
Structuralists
Developmental psychologists