The Self and Autism by Michael Fordham
Preface
This volume is the culmination of my work on the self in
childhood. Its contents are dominated throughout by the ideas
of Jung, though it may seem to many that I have departed
rather far from what he intended.
The departures may be
covered by the following statement: Jung is generally held to
have thought that the problems of individuation and of
self-realization were primarily those of later life and not of
childhood, though there are also indications—as Jacobi
maintained—that he thought they could be applied to the
whole span of life.
My own investigations have given importance
to childhood as the time when the ground plan of individuation
is laid down, and I regard this work as valuable, but I agree
that a whole class of people display the features that Jung
described, and that they clearly show a general feature of
maturation in ‘the second half of life’.
There is no contradiction
in saying that the self and individuation are important in
childhood, adolescence and the ‘first half of life5 also.
There has, however, been a curious reaction to my views,
mostly privately expressed.
The ideas that emerge have been so
peculiar that I should scarcely like to mention them were it not
that they appear to be influential.
It is claimed, quite correctly,
that the characteristic feature of Jung’s work was his emphasis
on the spiritual and religious life of human beings (I may remark
in passing that I have published a contribution to this aspect of
his work in a volume called The objective psyche, which was not
ill thought of by him) but there has arisen among some
analytical psychologists an idea that drawing attention to
infancy and childhood means the denigration of Jung’s work,
presumably because children, unlike Jung himself, do not have
spiritual or religious conflicts.
There seems, further, to be an
idea that, as in some primitive communities where the word
‘child’ is equated with ‘nothing’, childhood is insignificant.
Then some have considered it a positively wicked view to think
that infants and children have bodies and even feed at the
breast and develop fantasies about it; worse still, they have
excretary organs and genitals that, like the breast, are centres
of affective conflict that influence their lives as adult persons.
It
appears that Jungian children do not have any of these organs,
or if they do they certainly do not have any significant conflicts
or fantasies about them.
Only Freudian children or Kleinian
babies are afflicted with such troubles.
So it is said that I am
more of a ‘Freudian’ or a ‘Kleinian’ than a ‘Jungian’ !
It is, of course, true that I have studied the work of psychoanalysts-—
as Jung did too—and have learned a great deal from
them, and that I feel myself particularly fortunate to have
practised in London, where the relationship between the two
schools has been active and productive, but I doubt very much
whether either Freudians or Kleinians would accept me as one
of’them’.
Surely, if analytical psychology is to be thought of as
a science-—as Jung vigorously maintained it was—the conflict
between schools needs to be worked out in detail and not
reflected by sectarian prejudice, which has no place in any real
development or progress in knowledge.
To clarify the conflict
I have included special chapters on my relationship to
psychoanalytic concepts such as the religious experiences of
children.
The central feature of this volume remains Jung’s concept of
the self.
This was always related to clinical investigations.
His
concept and his method are of the first importance and they have
proved to be so when applied to childhood.
Following Jung, I
have kept every step in the development of my ideas closely
related to analytic observations.
The first part of what I have
written here may seem to do violence to this proposition in that
it is exclusively theoretical, but this is so only because the
observations on which the theory is based have already been
published in New developments in analytical psychology, which those
interested may refer to.
To gain a more comprehensive view of
how I conceive a child’s development as a whole, in relation to
his family and the social setting in which that family lives, it
will be necessary to refer to Children as individuals, published in
1969^
I did not previously put forward the concept of the self as a
defence system designed to establish and maintain a child’s
individuality until I was able to discover this through my
investigations into infantile autism, which I now present here
in detail for the first time.
Analytical observations are inevitably dependent upon the
practices that the investigator employs.
It is not justifiable to
present conclusions without giving some account, however
inadequate, of the methods used to arrive at them.
I have
therefore included in this book three chapters in order to give
some account of my practices and of the ideas and methods I
use; here again further information will be found in my earlier
publications, and I hope to publish more on the difficult
subject of technique.
It would require a special volume to deal satisfactorily with
a description of Jungian method, technique and practice
because so little has been written on it by analytical psychologists;
indeed, only one volume entirely devoted to it has ever
been published—Volume Two in this Library: Technique in
Jungian analysis. ~Robert A. Johnson, The Self and Autism, Page xiii – xv
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