Contemporary Jungian Analysis

Post-Jungian Perspectives from the Society of Analytical Psychology

Ian Alister, Christopher Hauke, Ian Alister, Christopher Hauke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415141666
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798880
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary psychotherapy, Contemporary Jungian Analysis, written by members of the Society of Analytical Psychology in London, covers the key concepts of Jungian analysis and therapy as it is practised today. Each chapter brings together two essays by different authors to give different perspectives on themes which are of common interest to psychotherapists of all persuasions. Topics include:
* infancy
* gender
* transference
* popular culture
* assessment and pathology
* dreams and active imagination
* the training of the therapist
* religious and spiritual issues.

Chapter 1
Infancy and Childhood, Research and Therapy

Veronika Marlow describes two infant observations in great detail paying special attention to the emotions and fantasies which were stirred up in her. This living experience complements and illustrates James Astor’s paper which provides a thorough description of Michael Fordham’s researches into childhood and infancy. Before Fordham, Jungian psychology did not have a sound genetic base. The classical Jungian view saw the self as an organising centre of the personality which came into prominence in the second half of life, when the tasks of the ego had been accomplished. By contrast, Astor writes, Fordham showed how Jung’s developmental concept of individuation was, in fact, a lifetime task made possible by the dynamic of the self, deintegration and reintegration. The practice of psychotherapy is illustrated by Astor with reference to mandala symbolism and to the children whose behaviour first suggested to Fordham a new way of viewing the child and individuation. Fordham’s model was both structural and dynamic and kept a distinction between pathological development and normal development. It has underpinned the London School’s integration of the clinical discoveries of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. Marlow uses Fordham’s paper ‘On Not Knowing Beforehand’ as the theoretical background for her infant observation, while Astor emphasises how the infant should be viewed as significantly influencing the environment in which he or she develops.

Fordham’s Developments of Jung in the Context of Infancy and Childhood

The self in infancy and childhood

James Astor

Introduction

A number of doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists in the 1930s became interested in the ideas of Jung as they applied to children. Prominent among them was Michael Fordham, a Jungian psychiatrist and analyst who was to become the key figure in the establishment of analytical psychology in Great Britain (see Astor, 1995). Central to Jung’s model of the mind is the idea that there is an individual self which is the totality of psyche and soma. Jung studied the symbols of the self but not primarily in childhood. He was interested in development, in what he called individuation and he worked most often with patients who came to him in the second half of their lives. Jung’s view of child development, however, was that ‘the things which have the most powerful effect upon children do not come from the conscious state of the parents but from their [the parents’] unconscious background’ (1954: para. 84). Coupled with this forthright attribution of children’s difficulties to their parents’ unlived lives was his assertion based on the dreams of three-and four-year-old children that, ‘The unconscious psyche of the child is truly limitless in extent and of incalculable age’ (1954: para. 95).

Jung’s ideas about the influence of the parents’ unconscious and the limitlessness of the child’s unconscious (primitive identity) held up the development of Jungian child analysis because they denied the existence of the child’s own individual life. Further, Jung contrasted the tasks of the first half of life with the tasks of the second. In the first half of life the child had to adapt to the collective values of the society in which he or she lived. He wrote, ‘before individuation can be taken for a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective standards must first be attained’ (1960: para. 760).

Jung thought of the child as leaving parts of the psyche projected into the world. Later he saw the second half of life as being a gradual process of withdrawing these projections so that individuation became a sort of intense introversion. Jung’s psychology was a purposeful one with aims and goals. The aim of childhood therefore seemed to be different from the aims of the mature adult. Fordham summarised the difference as follows:

Individuation is conceived to involve a goal opposite to that of childhood, when strengthening the ego is all important; the goal of individuation appears, on the contrary, only when ‘a suspension of the will results’.

(Fordham, 1969: 24-5)

Fordham, who was working in child guidance and who was basing his research on Jung’s theory of the archetypes, was discovering that there were processes active in childhood which were not describable exclusively in terms of ego development. He was encouraged in this view by another statement of Jung’s that ‘individuation is practically the same as the development of consciousness out of the original state of identity’ (1960: para. 762).

Early researches

In the early stages of his researches Fordham did not dare to think that individuation occurred in childhood, although it was implied in his studies. The significant data which led to a change in his thinking began with observations of a one-year-old boy who was allowed by his parents to scribble on the walls of his nursery. He noticed that the scribbles became more and more circle-like and, as they did, the boy discovered ‘as if by revelation’ the word ‘I’. The circles then stopped.

The relation in time between the discovery of the circle and the discovery of ‘I’ suggests that the circle represented the matrix of the self out of which the ego arose. The self seemed to prepare the ground for its emergence, to create a temenos in which the event could occur.

(Fordham, 1957: 134)

The circle seemed both to express the feeling of T, of completeness, of momentary recognition of his individual status, and a feeling of a boundary between himself and others, thus bringing together the ego and the self. This is because, according to Jung’s discussions of mandala symbolism, there is always a centre to a developed mandala and this centre and its circumference represents the self. Its particular significance to Fordham was that the presence of the boundary to the self suggested that the infant and young child’s world was not one of ‘participation mystique’, in which the environment and psyche were one. Fordham’s observation of this child’s ‘action of the self’ challenged Jung’s idea that the child’s unconscious psyche was limitless in extent.

The significance of Mandala symbolism

Jung discovered that mandalas were ‘cryptograms concerning the state of the self’. The discovery was gradual. It began with him sketching in a notebook. He noticed the form of his drawings, which were circles, with a centre, framed by a square and with the whole area loosely divided into four. He saw that the variations in these drawings corresponded to the state of his self, ‘In them I saw the self-that is my whole being actively at work’ (Jung, 1963: 187). Later he was to discover that the mandala was an important Taoist symbol of wholeness. Combining these experiences with his work with patients, who in dreams produced a series of mandalas, Jung began to work out their significance, not just as a symbol of the self, but also as a way of understanding how his fragmented patients sought and found containment.

What then was the purpose of the boundary to the circle? Jung had implied that the function of the mandala was protective. Fordham had noticed in his work with children that they used the circles they drew, both as containers which could even include bad experiences, and as protective barriers against intra-psychic dangers. In Jung’s examinations of mandala symbolism the centre, the contents which surrounded it, and the boundary circumference represented the self, which Jung differentiated from the ego. Fordham noticed with young children a relationship between this boundary, often a circle, and the beginnings of ego development. The boundary could therefore represent, he thought, a circumference to the ego (not the self) but also refer to the self, because of having emerged from it. This was because his investigations indicated that the danger to the child’s ego came from within the psyche (for instance nightmares) and the purpose of the boundary was to protect the ego from these dangers. But the self had to have a boundary too, for without it differentiation of consciousness from unconsciousness could not occur since the ego emerged from and existed outside of the self.

The two-year-old with ‘fits’

A case which made a deep impression on him was one in which a two-year-old girl was brought to him suffering from fits during which she became completely unconscious. She was clingy and would hardly let go of her mother-separating from her to come into the consulting room was at first too difficult. Gradually this changed, then one day she drew a circle and said ‘me’. ‘Almost at once her whole manner changed and she got down off her chair and played with some toys for several minutes’ (Fordham, 1957: 149). She became more confident and Fordham started making mothers and babies under her direction, in plasticine, which she tore up and then ran out of the room to see if her actual mother was all right. Her mother reported to Fordham at this time that her daughter had a tremendous curiosity about babies. Whenever she saw a pram she had to investigate it. More and more she wanted to repair the plasticine mummies and babies and with this came greater independence from her mother. The fits stopped. Fordham understood this experience of anxiety, followed by the emergence of ‘me’ and the subsequent working through of the destruction and then reparation of mummy as being her way of working out the difficulty. This had arisen from her not being able to separate her attacks on her internal mummy from herself (expressed in her fits which indicated the absence of the protective function of the boundary to the self and her consequent regression into unconsciousness). Checking on mummy during sessions and on babies in prams was part of the process of separating fantasy and reality. For Fordham the gradual psychotherapeutic resolution guided by him but resolved by her was another instance of an ego development arising from actions of the self: the scribble became a circle, and she integrated the realisation that there was a boundary between fantasy and reality.

At about this time Kellogg, in San Francisco, published some of her research into the scribbles and drawings of nursery-age children. She noted that the children’s pictures seemed to begin with rhythmic activities producing scribbles, out of which were abstracted definite shapes that were then combined to form pictures. Fordham thought of these pictures as examples of how, out of basic scribbles, emerged definite shapes and forms, as if the process was similar to how the ego developed out of the self.

The self

From these and numerous other observations Fordham was beginning to work out a theory of development which, while deriving from Jung’s work, was very different from it. In particular Fordham was evolving a theory of the self which extended Jung’s use of the concept to include eventually a primary state somewhat analogous to DNA but probably without its hereditary constituents, which gave rise to structures from interaction with the environment. This self, whose manifestations had archetypal form, existed outside of time and space and had mystical qualities similar to those described by William James (1902). Some of these manifestations would in time contribute to ego development. This original integrate, this primary self, combined the totality of conscious and unconscious systems and was an organising principle within the psyche. Fordham thought of it as continuous with the self Jung had described as significant for the integration of experience in the second half of life. The most important quality of Fordham’s self was its dynamic.

Deintegration and reintegration

For this integrated self to come into relation to the environment it needed to deintegrate; he therefore called the dynamic of the self deintegration and reintegration. Parts of the self which deintegrated were called deintegrates. The most important deintegrate of the self was the ego. A deintegrate of the self would retain characteristics of wholeness. A deintegrative activity could be an instinctual act, such as the hungry baby’s cry, that is, it would be contributing to the organism’s biological adaptation, or it could be the creation of an image with potentially symbolic meaning. This primary self was an agency of the psyche which transcended opposites. Fordham, however, in imagining how the infant self would come into relation to the environment, described the process as follows:

In essence, deintegration and reintegration describe a fluctuating state of learning in which the infant opens itself to new experiences and then withdraws in order to reintegrate and consolidate those experiences. During a deintegrative activity, the infant maintains continuity with the main body of the self (or its centre), while venturing into the external world to accumulate experience in motor action and sensory stimulation. …

(Fordham, 1988: 64)

Ego development

When does deintegration begin? This is difficult to say. Fordham thought the behaviour of neonates such as kicking, thumb-sucking, responding to sounds and tastes, even swallowing amniotic fluid, observed in utero with new scanning techniques, were instances of deintegrative activity. Towards the end of his life he suggested (Fordham, 1993) that birth can be understood as a massive deintegrative experience. If, as usually happens, the baby is immediately given to the mother after birth, then reintegration would occur. As normal development proceeds subject and object become more distinct. It is frequently stimulated by the infant encountering difficulties in adapting to aspects of the environment-for instance, the shape of the nipple or teat. The discomfort which arises from these experiences Fordham thought of as constructive anxiety, since the infant’s pain is in the service of its own development. This is the beginning of the individuation process and leads to what, in my view, is one of the most significant discoveries Fordham has made. This is that the infant’s self helps create the environment in which the infant develops, whether by evocative actions which elicit an empathic response from its mother or by its own sensitivity to what its mother can bear. Following on from this and inherent in Fordham’s idea is that the reintegrative experiences lead to changes in the infant’s way of experiencing ‘the world’ and consequently modifying his or her expectations of it.

A major difference here from Jung’s theorising was that Fordham did not think that the infant was mainly in touch with the collective unconscious, but that he or she was engaged in a dynamic interaction with another person. Important in this process was the mother’s capacity to receive and make sense of the baby’s communications in such a way that the baby took in from its mother’s attention an experience of the world, usually that it was safe and could be understood.

By observing infants and mothers, one can perceive sequences of deintegration and reintegration-the feeding/sleeping sequence being the most obvious one. Infant observations are full of instances where the baby stirs, the mother responds, a feed is initiated, more or less successfully negotiated, then the baby dozes off. Originally Fordham thought that the fit between mother and baby had to be perfect. Later he realised that by not being perfect it set in motion actions of the self, arising from constructive anxiety, which stimulated ego development. Later he summarised his theory:

According to the theory of the self that I was working on, deintegration leads to the formation of ego-nuclei round the oral, anal and genital zones especially. In the course of maturation they become linked to form a body image by a complex of processes. Though anatomically the zones are separated and serve distinct and different functions, this is not how a baby experiences them; the knowledge has to be acquired. At first it may be assumed experiences are registered in terms of pleasure and pain, very little located in space or time, and so similar experiences are treated as identical. Because of this, states of excitement in the zones are very much mixed up with each other; … The distinguishing of different kinds of excitement no doubt grows by repeated experience but they cannot be completely located and differentiated until a body image is formed; this involves perception and cathexis of the skin surface….

(Fordham, 1976: 218)

The self provided the underlying potential structure for the individual baby’s response to the world. Later further structuring of the personality occurred with the development of the ego. Previously Jungians had thought of the self as an integrator of experience. Fordham has said that this is only half the story. The self actively creates a dynamic system. Babies do not react passively to their mothers, but engage in numerous actions of the self, eliciting from their mothers what they need. F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Infancy and Childhood, Research and Therapy
• 2 The Body-Self Relationship
• 3 Patient and Analyst: Transference and Countertransference
• 4 Training and Supervision
• 5 Assessment, Diagnosis and Psychopathology
• 6 Dreams and Active Imagination
• 7 Religion and Spirituality
• 8 Gender and Sexuality
• 9 Myth and Fairy Tales
• 10 The Creative Interface with Culture
• 11 Social Issues
• 12 Contemporary Overview of Jungian Perspectives
• Subject index
• Name index