ABSTRACT
M. Fordham maintains that the depressive position is an early step in individuation. His work on this has a central feature: thinking about feeling. Fordham's concept of the self as an essentially psychosomatic entity is expanded in the following passage from 'Some Observation on the Self and Ego in Childhood': The sequence can be conceived as follows: the original self deintegrates spontaneously. Fordham's studies of archetypal patterns of behaviour have focused on the maturation of the individual, rather than on the development of the cultural patterns and history of our time. The mutual influence of the two groups resulted in several interesting clinical symposia. Scrutiny of the patient-analyst interaction has been a fruitful area for the further investigation of the actions of the self with particular reference to the experiences on the boundaries, surfaces, and walls of the container and their impact on development.
