Michael Scott Montague Fordham was an English child psychiatrist and Jungian analyst.
14 Facts About Michael Fordham
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Michael Fordham's pioneering research into infancy and childhood led to a new understanding of the self and its relations with the ego.
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Michael Fordham was instrumental in founding the Society of Analytical Psychology, London, in 1946 and a founder of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, the foremost journal in the field, of which he was editor for 15 years from 1955.
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Michael Fordham went up to Trinity College, Cambridge to read Natural science.
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Michael Fordham took the degrees of MB and BCh in 1931, and became an MRCP in 1932.
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In 1928, Michael Fordham married Molly Swabey, and their son, Max was born in 1933.
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Michael Fordham was disappointed in this quest and returned to London.
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Michael Fordham married his second wife, and was appointed consultant psychiatrist to evacuated children in the Nottingham area.
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Michael Fordham continued the monumental work of editing Jung's then published works that eventually grew to 20 volumes, and kept up a correspondence with Jung, sometimes needing to be extremely diplomatic in tackling 'inconsistencies'.
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Michael Fordham was inspired by Jung, but was not a Jungian.
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Michael Fordham died there on 14 April 1995, in his 90th year.
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In 1947 Michael Fordham proposed a distinct theory of the primary self to describe the state of the psyche of neonates, characterised by homeostasis, or 'steady state' as he calls it, where self and other are undifferentiated, where there is no distinction between the internal and external world, and where there are as yet no different components in the internal world.
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Michael Fordham coined the term deintegration - as opposed to disintegration - to denote a state akin to the Kleinian depressive position, where, as a result of a sense of major ruptures, or loss of contact with feeling fed and contained, a deep sense of disappearance, perhaps even of non-being ensues.
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The Michael Fordham Prize is awarded for exceptionally innovative articles submitted to the Journal of Analytical Psychology.