Understanding Infants Psychoanalytically

A Post-Jungian Perspective on Michael Fordham's Model of Development

Elizabeth Urban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000546286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Focussing on infants and the relationship between child and parent, this book presents a discourse on eminent Jungian child analyst Michael Fordham's model of development that extended Jung's theory to infancy and childhood.

In this book, Elizabeth Urban, a Jungian psychotherapist in weekly conversations with Fordham, proposes five key areas, such as identifying periods of primary self-funcionin and the active participation of the infant in development, that contribute to the Fordham model of infant development. Drawing extensively on her observations and experiences working in a London child and adolescent unit, and a mother and baby unit, as well as using real-life observations to support the proposed contributions, the author provides a deeper understanding of infant development in the context of the relationship with the parents.

This book is a unique contribution to the study of child development and is of great interest to paediatricians, psychotherapists, and other mental health professionals who work with children and their parents.

Part I
Theory

Chapter 1
The primary self and related concepts in Jung, Klein and Isaacs

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215639-3

Introduction

This chapter has its source in some comments made by Dr Fordham in one of my supervision sessions. The patient under discussion was a boy with autistic features, who had been seeing me in analysis for three years. When Dr Fordham said, almost as an aside, that it is not possible to analyse someone who has autism, I was considerably taken aback, because that was what I thought I had been trying to do. When I asked what he meant, he answered that analysis is of internal objects, and autistic children have no internal objects. What do they have inside? I wondered, and Dr Fordham answered that the primary self is lacking in contents. This made me realise that I had confusions and misconceptions about the primitive mind and its contents. This chapter represents my attempt to address these questions. It is a study of early psychic contents and processes, beginning with a consideration of the differences between Jung, Klein and Isaacs, on the one hand, and Fordham, on the other. I then examine Fordham’s theory of a primary self and its actions, I and attempt to describe how contents are built up in the psyche. Some of the primary processes described are illustrated by an infant observation. At the end of the chapter I give clinical material through which I hope to show how the same psychic processes that contribute co psychic growth can also result in the failure of psychic development.

A, if not the, major difference between Freud and Jung lay in their views about the inner world. Freud’s main emphasis was on the way contents of the mind are derived from personal experience, whereas Jung’s studies viewed the mind as innately endowed with priori configurations that encompass far more than personal contents.

Klein too departed from Freud on this point, and the Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytic Society revolved around this issue (Hinshelwood 1989). Both Jung and Klein thought that the primary contents of the mind are inextricably bound up with the instincts, that in fact they are the mental representations of the instincts.

According to Jung, the primary content of the psyche is the archetype. In contrast to instincts the ‘ “archetypes” are inborn forms of “intuition” ’ (Jung 1919, p. 133).

Analogous to instinct, with the difference that whereas the impulse to carry out some highly complicated purposive apprehension of a highly complicated action, intuition is the unconscious purposive apprehension of a highly complicated situation.

(ibid., p. 133)

Jung also noted the similarities between archetypes and instincts. The archetypes make up the collective unconscious, which is universal and impersonal; that is, it is the same for all individuals. Instincts, according to Jung, are also impersonal and universal, and are, also like the archetypes, hereditary factors of a dynamic or motivating character. Thus, instincts form very close analogues to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious phantasies. Klein writes, ‘I believe that phantasies operate from the outset, as do the instincts, and are the mental expression of the activity of both the life and death instincts’ (Klein 1952, p. 58). Isaacs presents a fuller exposition of the relationship between phantasies and instincts than does Klein. Isaacs states that ‘phantasies are the primary content of unconscious mental processes’ (Isaacs 1952, p. 82). ‘The mental expression of instinct is unconscious phantasy. Phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct’ (ibid., p. 83).

Although for the most part Klein and Isaacs describe phantasies in terms of stories, for example, ‘I want to eat her all up’, these stories are based upon images:

What, then, does the infant hallucinate? We may assume, since it is the oral impulse which is at work, first, the nipple, then the breast, and later his mother as a whole person; and he hallucinates the nipple or the breast in order to enjoy it. As we can see from his behaviour (sucking movements, sucking his own lip or a little later his fingers, and so on), hallucination does not stop at the mere picture, but carries him on to what he is, it in detail, going to do with the desired object which he imagines (phantasies) he has obtained.

(Ibid., p. 86)

The ‘picture’ of the breast that is an image of the instinct make Isaacs’s description of unconscious phantasies virtually identical to Jung’s description of the archetype as the ‘self-portrait of the instinct’. When Isaacs wrote, ‘such knowledge (of the breast) is in the aim of instinct’ (ibid., p. 94), she can be understood to be talking about the same thing that Jung described when he stated that the yucca moth has an image of the yucca flower and its structure, so that, when present externally, the flower sets off instinctual behaviour (Jung 1919). Both Jung and Isaacs stated that there is an image of the aim of the instinct – the object that fulfils the instinctual urge that exists within the psyche, enabling the instinct to know that for which it is looking.

Important differences do, however, exist between Jung and Klein. Klein was a psychoanalyst who extended Freud’s concepts of libidinal and destructive instincts to pre-Oedipal development, focusing on how infancy lies at the core of the personality. On the other hand, although Jung drew attention to the inherent richness of the mind before Klein began writing, his interest in childhood and infancy was limited. Although he referred to the individuality of the infant (Jung 1911, 1921), for the most part he thought that the infant is in primary identity with the mother (Jung 1927). The issue of primary identity raises a number of questions which have since been addressed by Fordham.

The self, the primary self and ‘the ultimate’: Jung and Fordham

My misconception was that I had pictured an innate, internal realm of images and phantasies that from birth were projected onto the external world. Sorting this out required that I ‘empty out’ the contents of the infant mind and differentiate between the self described by Jung and the primary self described by Fordham. Jung concluded from his studies ‘that a class of images, expressing totality, symbolises the self, defined as the total personality, conscious and unconscious’ (Fordham 1976, p. 11). Jung’s awareness of the self arose from the period following his break with Freud. At this time he discovered the meaning of the mandala symbols that preoccupied him. In Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung wrote, ‘Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: “Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation”… . Mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self – that is my whole being actively at work’ Jung 1963a, p. 221). Later he added, ‘I knew that in finding the mandala as the expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate’ (ibid., p. 222).

The ‘ultimate’ to which he referred is the individuating self, which, according to Jung, emerges out of an initial primary identity with the mother (Jung 1927). Fordham applied Jung’s ideas about the self and individuation to early childhood and introduced clinical material from his work in support of the idea that children show signs of individuation at a very early age (Fordham 1969). He revised Jung’s ideas and postulated that the child’s individuation emerges not out of a primary identity with the mother, but out of an original, or primary self, which is a pre-individuating self (Fordham 1976). Drawing from Jung’s definition of the self as ‘the totality unconscious’ (Jung 1955, p. 389) of the psyche altogether, i.e. ‘conscious and unconscious’ (Jung 1955, p. 389), and also on the claim that ‘the self embraces the bodily sphere as well as the psyche’ (Jung 1963b, p. 503), Fordham defined the primary self as ‘a psychosomatic integrate – a blueprint for psychic maturation – from which the behaviour of infants may be derived as they gradually develop and differentiate into children, adolescents and adults’ (Fordham 1976, p. 11). Thus ‘the ultimate’ for Jung is the individuating self, and for Fordham it is the primary self.

Together these two concepts describe the self as alpha and omega. To understand this more fully, I have found it important to consider how the ‘empty’ primary self (Fordham’s ‘ultimate’, the ultimate source), which has the potential for providing the space for inner objects, acquires the characteristics of inside and outside and develops into a container for psychic contents to which the ego might then relate Jung’s ‘ultimate’, the ultimate goal. For me this has meant going back to ‘the very beginning’, to the point at which the primary self is in its most primary state, before it has any characteristics and when it is ‘pure’ potential. This – Fordham’s ‘ultimate’ in its ultimate form – would be at the instant when the foetal organism acquires a psychic constituent (thereby becoming psychosomatic) but prior to deintegration and reintegration, that is to any further relating to the environment. This state exists only as a theoretical construct. But, for my purposes here, it is important to describe it.

The fertilised egg at the instant of union more aptly illustrates the primary self at ‘the very beginning’ than does the infant at birth. This is because deintegration and reintegration occur in utero. These processes are accelerated at birth and lead eventually to the internalisation of objects and, later, to symbolisation. But, at birth, the primary self has developed beyond its original state. Originally the primary self exists as nothing but potential. As Fordham described it, it is a ‘pregnant void’:

I conclude with a reflection on the ‘ultimate’. I take it to represent a state in which there is no past and no future, though it is present like a point which has position but no magnitude. It has no desires, no memory, no thoughts, no images but out of it by transformation all of these can deintegrate. There is no consciousness and so no unconscious – it is a pregnant absence.

(Fordham 1985, p. 33)

The primary self at birth has developed from the ‘ultimate’ but is still mainly without contents; that is, it is primarily void-but-predisposed-to-receive objects from without that can be internalised. Furnishing the internal world really gets under way only after increased deintegrative and reintegrative processes have taken place after birth. However, the primary self has undergone transformations from ‘the very beginning’ up until birth and to the point at which there are the primary contents described by Jung, Klein and Isaacs. That is, the images considered by them to be innate are not; what is innate is the potential and predisposition to have images.

Fordham drew upon Freud’s analogy of the protozoa amoeba to the ego to describe his postulate of the primary, pre-individuating self, and I would like to extend the analogy to describe Fordham’s ‘ultimate’. In Fordham’s analogy, the amoeba, like the primary self, is a living organism. It is a nucleated mass of protoplasm, most dense at the outside, which forms a boundary with the outside world. Finger-like extensions called pseudopodia protrude from the amoeba and engulf food, which is then incorporated into the organism. In this analogy, the nucleated endoplasm of the amoeba corresponds to the centralising and ordering functions of the primary self. The pseudopodia correspond to deintegrates of the primary self, extending out and relating to the environment while still maintaining a relationship to the whole. The taking in and digestion of food corresponds to reintegration.

A model of the primary self at its most primary state – at its ‘very beginning’ – is of a less developed amoeba. This can be pictured by imagining the reversal of the development of the amoeba as though looking at high-speed film shown in reverse. The amoeba will then be seen to become smaller and smaller, its ectoplasm shrinking to become part of the nucleated mass until the whole of the organism becomes quite simply a dot, ‘like a point which has position but no magnitude’ (Fordham 1985, p. 33).

Another picture of Fordham’s ‘ultimate’, which views it from the inside, so to speak, has been supplied to me by the conscious vision of a patient in her late twenties. This vision occurred at the outset of a period of considerable change in the patient’s life. I understand this experience to belong to a state of integration, in which deintegrates came together momentarily into a state of oneness, expressed through an image of ‘the ultimate’. This experience is relevant to my subject because states of integration in individuating adults are very similar to primary states of integration in infancy and thus to the primary self. As Fordham commented:

It follows that in normal development the ‘delusional’ state of primary identity or unity-with the mother can only be transitory and the formation of a new integrate, a new dynamic equilibrium within the infant, corresponding to, but more differentiated than, the original self unit.

(Fordham 1985. p. 110)

In this vision the patient is an infinitely small speck – ‘a point with position but no magnitude’ – in an infinitely large universe of blue sky which is a pure nothingness. She ‘knows’ that this is the moment of death. Around and before her is timeless eternity, in which she is suspended in an eternal pause of beginning. This seems to be what Fordham described as the ‘pregnant absence’ of ‘the ultimate’ (Fordham 1985, p. 33).

The dynamics of the primary self: deintegration and reintegration

For Jung and Klein, the contents of the mind, whether they are called archetypal images or internal objects, are autonomous internal realities, relating to one another, to the ego and, via projection and introjection, to the external world. But how does the primary self relate to the environment if it has no contents to project? In answering this question, Fordham offered a unique contribution to our ideas about psychic dynamics as well as about individual development. He wrote:

I considered the self as a dynamic system that acted not only as an integrator of psychic and physical elements bur also as a system that spontaneously could divide itself ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Theory
• Part II Developments
• Part III Extensions
• Appendix: Elizabeth Urban – list of publications
• Index