Michael Fordham

Michael Scott Montague Fordham (4 August 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an English child psychiatrist and Jungian analyst.

He was a co-editor of the English translation of C.G. Jung's Collected Works.

His clinical and theoretical collaboration with psychoanalysts of the object relations school led him to make significant theoretical contributions to what has become known as 'The London School' of analytical psychology in marked contrast to the approach of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich.

His pioneering research into infancy and childhood led to a new understanding of the self and its relations with the ego.

Part of Fordham's legacy is to have shown that the self in its unifying characteristics can transcend the apparently opposing forces that congregate in it and that while engaged in the struggle, it can be exceedingly disruptive both destructively and creatively.

The second son of Montague Edward Fordham and his wife Sara Gertrude Worthington, Fordham was born in Kensington, London and was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk (1918–1923), where in 1924 Fordham played Don Adriano in a Gresham's School performance of Love's Labour's Lost.

In 1920 his mother died.

From then on, Fordham was mentored by a friend of the family, Helton Godwin Baynes, who would later influence the young man's career path.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge (1924-1927) to read Natural science.

For his clinical training he attended St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College (1927-1932).

In 1928, Fordham married Molly Swabey, and their son, Max was born in 1933.

He took the degrees of MB and BCh in 1931, and became an MRCP in 1932.

On completing his medical qualification in 1932, Fordham's first post was as a House Officer (Junior Medical Officer) at Long Grove Mental Hospital in Epsom, Surrey.

The following year he began to read Jung's writings.

In 1934 he was appointed as a registrar in Child Psychiatry, London Child Guidance Clinic.

The same year he entered into a personal analysis with H. G. Baynes and visited Zurich to meet Jung, intending to train with him.

He was disappointed in this quest and returned to London.

In 1935 he began a year as a General Practitioner in Barking, Essex, and terminated his analysis with Baynes and switched to the Jung-trained Hildegard Kirsch, married to another Jungian, James Kirsch, the couple having moved to England to escape Nazi Germany.

Also in 1936, he took up a part-time consultant's post at a Child Guidance clinic in Nottingham, in the Midlands.

In 1940, their marriage was dissolved and he married, secondly, Frieda Hoyle, a social worker and later also an analyst.

At the out-break of the Second World War, he remained in Nottingham, and his marriage came to an end by 1940.

Also in 1940, his analyst, Hildegard Kirsch, emigrated to the United States.

In 1942 a new phase of his life began.

He married his second wife, and was appointed consultant psychiatrist to evacuated children in the Nottingham area.

In 1943 his long-time mentor and friend H. G. Baynes died.

In 1945 he became a co-editor of English translation of C. G. Jung's Collected Works for the publishing houses of Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press.

Later that year, he became a co-founder with seven colleagues, of the Society of Analytical Psychology – SAP – in London.

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.

In 1947 he obtained the Degree of MD.

He 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'.

Throughout the next decades he ran a private analytic practice and had a role in the Tavistock Clinic teaching trainees involved in baby observations.

He lectured and wrote papers and books.

With his wife he played a pivotal role in training the next generation of Jungian analysts and making major theoretical contributions.

In the 1970s he would also finally establish a separate Jungian training for analysts wishing to specialise in work with children and adolescents.

With the move back to the capital, he took up the post of Consultant to the Child Guidance Clinic at the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases.

The 1970s were marked by increased tensions over the theoretical direction the SAP should take.

Two camps developed: the one led by Jung disciple and refugee from Germany, Gerhard Adler, who promoted the Archetypal school, aligned to classical teaching and the other, led by Fordham, who had been declined by Jung and who impressed upon trainees and younger colleagues, the discipline of the psychoanalytic 'Independent Group', who laid great stress on examining early child development in the analysis of adults and working with the transference.

Until Fordham's systematic approach to this area, Jung's intuitions on the subject had not been followed up at the Zurich Institute, pace the Swiss 'lay' analyst Dora Kalff, who ran with Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld's idea of engaging children in diagnostic sandplay.

In 1971 he was honoured by becoming a Founder Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

These differences proved organisationally and personally insuperable, and Adler and his supporters left the SAP to form an alternative organisation in 1977.