Michael Fordham
Found the self already present in infancy.
Founder of the developmental school of analytical psychology, who brought Jung's ideas into the consulting room with children.
techniques
The self is not the end of development but its starting point.
Who they were
Michael Fordham co-edited Jung's Collected Works and founded the Journal of Analytical Psychology, but his lasting contribution came from watching babies. Jung had treated the self as something reached in the second half of life; Fordham argued that a primary self exists from the very beginning, and that development happens as it repeatedly opens out to meet the world and gathers itself back in — deintegration and reintegration. This put him at odds with Jungian orthodoxy and in productive conversation with Klein and Winnicott, and it made analytical psychology usable with children for the first time. The London school he founded remains one of the field's three main branches.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their big idea
The Developmental School
Michael Fordham found a whole self already present in infancy, growing by opening out to the world and gathering back in. Donald Kalsched later traced what happens when that process meets trauma — bringing analytical psychology into conversation with attachment and dissociation research.
The approach they founded
Analytical (Jungian) Therapy
A journey toward wholeness through symbols, dreams and the integration of the shadow.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Fordham — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.