ABSTRACT
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).
