Michael Fordham

Innovations in Analytical Psychology

James Astor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134871049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Michael Fordham's immense contribution to analytical psychology has been marked by its combination of practical and theoretical genius. Before retirement he ran a full clinical practice alongside the co-editorship of The Collected Works of Jung, development of the Society of Analytical Psychology and its child and adult trainings, and a fifteen-year editorship of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. In his published work there has emerged a consistent and original contribution to Jungian thought, particularly in relation to the processes of individuation on childhood, and the links between analytical psychology and the work of the Kleinians. James Astor takes a critical and informed look at Fordham's work and ideas. Illustrating theory with examples drawn from clinical practice, the book will provide a useful amplification of Fordham's own work for students of analytical psychology and a sound introduction to it for analysts interested in understanding the connections between post-Jungian and post-Kleinian thought.

Chapter 1

Thinking into feeling

The person

Introduction

The most remarkable characteristic of Michael Fordham is his capacity to think into feelings, to be affected by his experiences and gradually begin to find meaning in them, especially in the pain. Feelings represent our experience and to be able to think about the meaning of feelings is to take the first step on the road to conceptualizing experience, something which Fordham is particularly gifted at (see Hubback 1986a, b).

This quality of thinking into feeling has developed in him slowly over the years. As a child and adolescent he could use his thinking as an armour against loss and depression. To think, and struggle to know and understand, provided a structure which was reliable when the external world was unpredictable and unreliable. He was the youngest of three children and the naughtiest. He feared his naughtiness damaged his mother, who was delicate and suffered from asthma, and when he was fifteen she died from an asthma attack on a family holiday. This devastated him. He loved her deeply and from the account he gives in his memoir he did not truly mourn her. He became for a short while physically ill, somatizing his loss of his mother in an effort to internalize her and experiencing a feeling of her being there during the illness (Fordham 1993e), a feeling which was to return when he fell in love. He switched off his feelings of loss, and became a rather truculent schoolboy whose performance was uneven. Academically he was able to learn but was unteachable if he was not interested in the subject. His prowess at games made him something of a star, playing cricket, rugby and captaining the hockey team for the school. He also regularly acted in the school play. These activities gave him prominence and position in the school and helped him stabilize himself after his mother’s death. He was a success but it felt unsatisfactory, and it lacked the authenticity for him to feel identified with the school ethos. He never became an ‘old boy’.

Because of his forceful intelligence and ability to hold on to thoughts and to think while under pressure he could seem to the naive onlooker to be an unfeeling man. Nothing could be further from the truth. He feels deeply but does not deal in raw emotion, nor in confessional revelation. He has learnt from his experience to digest his feelings and the most important person in facilitating this process, after his mother, was Frieda, his wife for almost fifty years, who died in 1988. Judith Hubback, a senior training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, wrote:

Michael speaks of how Frieda’s way of offering comments throughout the years has had a profound influence on him. He describes her as his ‘supervisor’ to whom he regularly entrusted clinical material; her responsive and wise judgement was evidently invaluable, given much less in the form of expounded theories or views or opinions, but rather – he stresses this – as stable comments.

(Hubback 1986b, p. 245)

Her containing qualities provided the contemporary base from which he went out into the world. Her infirmity and gradual withdrawal from him towards the end of her life affected him profoundly in ways he has described in his memoir, some of which induced conflicts which brought him near to death (Fordham 1993e).

Family

The Fordhams are a Hertfordshire family, landowners, and in the past they were active in local politics. Michael has a sense of himself, vested in part in a sense of place; he was told as he was growing up that his family owned all the land round their family house, as far as the eye could see. This, combined with the local importance of his relations – one of his uncles reached national and historical prominence inventing the science of cartobibliography, and being knighted for political services – gave him, he claims, a confidence which stems from knowing quality when he sees it. Almost as if this is innate to the breed, he’s a Fordham ‘bred in the bone’. There is a social (and snobbish) element to this: social in the sense of his deriving a sense of himself from an early experience of not having to ‘prove’ he was ‘someone’. It was sufficient to be a Fordham, he felt, and in so feeling he identified himself with the family’s arrogance.

Michael was born in 1905. He passionately loved his mother, and in the drawing he has of her she looks beautiful and serene. She was from a respected Manchester family, which was ‘tainted’ by an unconventional interest in the arts. She trained to become an opera singer. (At the end of the nineteenth century to allow one’s daughter to train as a singer was a social risk bordering on the disreputable.) But she never had a career as a singer. In my view his wanting to understand what happened to his mother has been an important unconscious stimulus in his life. How could so much beauty have so much destructive asthmatic suffocation inside? In this book I do not emphasize the destructive aspects of the self because this has not been Fordham’s special contribution, but that is not to say that this aspect of the self has not informed his work. It is noticeable in his writings on autism and psychosis and is an essential constituent of his understanding of his own life in his memoir. In fact his preference for Klein over Winnicott has been because Klein confronted the destructiveness of human beings and did not place too much optimistic reliance on the goodness of mothers, which is what Fordham feels Winnicott did. Nowadays the analytic landscape is often compared, since Klein’s work, with the child’s perception of the interior of the mother’s body and much of Fordham’s analytic work has involved the investigation of the internal chambers of the mother’s body for the emotional significance of their contents (see Meltzer [1992] for a full description of the conceptualization of these projective states). This task has deepened his understanding of the self.

His father was active in local politics in Birmingham but sometime after he married he moved first to London then to the country for his wife’s health. There he followed his interests in agriculture, about which he wrote books. He had other interests too and lived the life of a gentleman. He was particularly interested in the Arts and Craft Movement and writers were his friends. Galsworthy was Michael’s godfather. But his father was not the eldest son, so did not inherit the properties, and towards the end of his life he ran out of money. It is possible that his death was suicide; he was killed by a train at a notoriously dangerous level crossing.

His father was devoted to his mother and her death was a great blow to him. Family life effectively came to an end after her death. From then on Michael had no real home until he married. And while his father was in the background if his son needed him, he mostly left him to get on with his life. Fordham’s account of his good feelings for his father’s reliability and the facts of his father being unable to sustain a family life for his sons and daughter when his wife died could seem to be a contradiction, if looked at from the point of view of thinking about how a father ought to be. But it seems, in talking to Fordham about this now, that what dominated this period of his and his father’s lives were the feelings of devastation arising from his mother’s death, devastation that had had as great an impact on his father as on him.

Michael became a doctor. His older brother suggested it to him because he thought it would be interesting to have one in the family, and Michael was good at biology, maths and, later, physiology. His ambition at school had been to go into the navy, but although he was short-listed to the last thirty for officer training, he failed the written exam. Medicine was an unusual choice, since in his family doctors were not shown to the front door: they had to come round to the side door, because it was regarded as shameful to be ill. He went to Cambridge and read natural sciences before qualifying in medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital medical school.

In 1928 he married Molly Swabey (Fordham 1993e, p. 53). Molly was trying to establish herself as a journalist and Fordham was an impoverished medical student. They lived in a small flat in Bloomsbury and when Fordham eventually qualified in medicine they had a small house near his work in Epsom. Their son Max was born in 1933. During this period of his life Fordham was developing his interests in Jung and as soon as he could he moved back to London and a fellowship in child psychiatry at the London Child Guidance Clinic. The marriage to Molly was unsettled, both partners according to Fordham feeling restless. An additional symptomatic complication of this restlessness was that another woman fell in love with Fordham and he let the relationship develop. Baynes, his analyst, unfortunately treated this as an instance of Fordham needing to understand his anima, the female side of his personality, and encouraged the liaison (Fordham 1993e, p. 67). The marriage deteriorated, and both of them had affairs.

Today it is quite usual for couples to marry when they are still students or for the wife to be the wage earner. This was the state of affairs in our marriage at first, and at this period we would both have needed to develop and deepen the meaning of the marriage for it to survive. Molly wanted to and went into analysis, but it was not enough, while my analysis had not helped me in that part of my development. As a result of that situation my identity as a man became disturbed and the attempt to correct it led to quarrels. I do not want to give the impression that my first marriage was not valuable; indeed there was much in it that was rich and productive, Max being its culmination. It also led to each of us establishing ourselves professionally.

(Fordham 1993e, p. 75)

At this time (1934) Fordham met Frieda Hoyle with whom he fell in love. Out of guilt he tried to separate from her, although this did not work. Molly and he were divorced in 1940 and he married Frieda later that year. She had two sons from her first marriage. The war had begun so Molly took Max to stay with her brother in the Caribbean to avoid the bombs in London. He settled in well there and she decided to return to England to remarry. While crossing the Atlantic in 1942 her boat was sunk and she was drowned. Max today is married with children and is successful in his work as an engineer for which he was recently awarded an OBE. In addition he has a professorship at Bath University, and is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA.

Michael Fordham never planned his life or career. Nor did he suffer from ambition. He turned down a consultant’s post in the health service in the early years of his medical career, a post which in his words would have ‘made’ him (Fordham 1993e). But if he was asked to run something and he liked the idea he’d do it. He thought there was more potential in analytical psychology than in running a clinic. The posts he refused nearly always involved too much time spent doing what he did not want to do. He wanted to lead a full good life, to be useful and creative. Both his father and Jung had a sense of social responsibility. Michael did too, but what frequently happened to him was that others had a high opinion of him, seeing in him qualities he was not confident of in himself. Part of his struggle therefore has been to discover his own talents, talents which felt authentic to him.

He had a driven quality once he found something to be interested in. It might have been scientific research but it turned out to be analytical psychology, almost fortuitously. He first met Jung when Baynes suggested he went to see Jung with a view to training in Zurich (ibid., p. 67). The aura surrounding this first meeting was in part created by the young doctor’s awed feelings for this pioneer and apostate of psychoanalysis, who had developed his own system. Remembering it later Fordham mentioned in his memoir the setting by the lake of Jung’s house and how this had a magic to it too, which contributed to the numinousness of the occasion. It was then that his anima fell in love with Jung (ibid., p. 69), a love which was similar to his love for his father (ibid., p. 113).

The Analyst

The connection between Fordham’s thinking about and into feelings and his interest in the self began with his reaction to the loss of his mother, and flowered in the development of his scientific attitude to himself which was fostered in his first analysis, with Godwin Baynes (Fordham 1993e). This analysis was conducted without reference to the transference and while it was of limited value it did free up his unconscious and allow him to be more open in his attitudes to his own states of mind. At first this interest was predominantly intellectual, but gradually it became more integrated into his feeling. Jung’s work on the self began to take its distinctive shape after his break from Freud, an event characterized by Satinover (1985) as the loss for Jung of a good object. In similar fashion Fordham’s researches were stimulated by his interest in feelings of loss. Fordham’s discovery of the importance of the self, which emerged out of a conscious decision to investigate childhood, took him by surprise. He did not expect to find symbols of the self in childhood. When he did, it was as if it was almost making retrospective sense of his own survival, which is how in his memoir he describes it. The ego may fragment, even disintegrate, but the self is indestructible, except by death. His subsequent championing of the self in childhood could be seen as a way of countering the deterministic, almost fatalistic bias which had crept into the popular consciousness with the arrival of psychoanalysis – namely, that if parents were at fault, as Jung originally thought, then without the self what chance did the individual have to free himself from the determinism of his childhood? Fordham’s sustained investigation of this in his work began when he met Frieda Hoyle although his interest in the self began when sitting on his mother’s knee when he had ‘the first intimation that the self was important, as something greater than me, yet of whom I am a part’ (Fordham 1993e, p. vi).

Just as the little boy’s awareness needed the possession and relative safety of his mother’s lap underneath him for the acknowledgement of the transcendent quality of his self, so too did Fordham’s later work on the self have underpinning it his marriage to Frieda. This long, stable marriage (forty-eight years) was the most productive period of his life. When he felt safe emotionally this gave a greater depth and continuity of focus to his work. It was to her too that he took the rough drafts of his books and papers, and it was she who helped him turn them into readable English.

The Author

Fordham’s weakest subject at school was English and yet he has spent a lot of his professional life writing. Sometimes he has been consciously filling in the gaps left by Jung. His work on the biological basis of archetypes, on ego development, or on countertransference are examples of where Jung either had not filled in the picture, or had only sketched an outline which needed elaboration. Similarly he deliberately looked for an autistic child patient to analyse in order to test out certain ideas he had which derived from his study of Jung’s work. This was in the context of his continuing investigations of childhood and his initially tentative revisions of Jung’s view of individuation to include the beginnings of ego development in childhood. Being asked to write about abandonment for an American conference led to one of his most important papers (Fordham 1985b) which brought together his ideas about the self and his experience of infant observation. It further helped him to describe where he differed from Kleinian child analysts. Students asking him about Neumann detonated out of him the powerful paper he wrote on Neumann and childhood (Fordham 1981a). Often the analysis of a particular patient stimulated him to write about their work together, usually in an effort to make more sense for himself of what was happening, or had happened. His papers on transference and interaction and his much quoted paper on the defences of the self (Fordham 1974f) emerged in this way.

Another stimulus for his written work was the discussions within the Society of Analytical Psychology. For instance, when issues to do with training were being aired it often led to his setting out his views in a paper which might first have been given at one of the Society’s scientific meetings. Papers on training analysis, supervision and transference come within this category. Retrospectively I have ordered this work to give the impression of a succession, one idea, thought or concept following on from the last. This does not correspond to Fordham’s experience of his own life and work. When I wrote a preliminary paper on one aspect of his work entitled The Emergence of Fordham’s Model of Development (Astor 1990), his response to it was that he did not realize that this was what he had done.

Beginnings

In writing about Fordham’s work I have not linked particular developments or changes in his ideas to his personal life, except in a general way. This is in part because he does not himself connect the evolution of his ideas to chronological time. What he was thinking or feeling at particular points in his life he has described in his memoir. There was the period before the Second World War when he was discovering Jung, working in psychiatry and beginning his interest in analysis. Then during the war years he was a consultant for evacuated children living in hostels in the Midlands. He was active among the Jungians in England during that time but they all felt very cut off from Jung himself. Meanwhile he was collecting the material which was to form his first book The Life of Childhood (1944). The rise of the Nazis, however, did bring refugees to the UK who had been trained by Jung, and some were later to gather round Fordham to form the Society of Analytical Psychology. After the war he came to live in London and worked in private practice and the child guidance clinic of the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases, which was to become better known later as the Paddington Clinic. This period in London coincided with his being asked to help start the Society of Analytical Psychology. Prior to that, Jungians who were interested in Jung’s ideas met at the Analytical Psychology Club, and those who were in practice met in a group organized by Godwin Baynes. The establishment of an organization for the training of analysts marked the beginning of the professionalization of analytical psychology (see Samuels 1994).

Fordham and others wished to create a training in London which was independent of Zurich where up to then those wanting to become Jungian analysts had to go for analysis and seminars. Jung was not particularly helpful about this training as he thought that becoming an analyst was a vocation, which had to be supported by a personal analysis and the study of mythology. (The Zurich Institute was started by his pupils, not by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Thinking into feeling: The person
• 2. Jung’s psychological model
• 3. Jung and Fordham
• 4. The self in infancy and childhood: Pioneering discoveries
• 5. Ego development in infancy and childhood: The integration of observational research
• 6. Archetypes: Their biological basis and actions of the self
• 7. Autism: A disorder of the self
• 8. The discovery of the syntonic transference, and of the importance of analysing childhood
• 9. Countertransference, interaction and not knowing beforehand
• 10. Defences of the self, projective identification and identity
• 11. Christian experience, mysticism and the self
• 12. Synchronicity: An interpretation
• Afterword
• Appendix: notes on some early discussions of transference, 1953–4
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Bibliography of the work of Michael Fordham
• General bibliography
• Index