Chapter 1

JUNG AND THE POST-JUNGIANS ON THE

THEORY OF JUNGIAN CHILD ANALYSIS
Margo M. Leahy

Jung and his Relationship to Childhood and Child Analysis

One of the most common questions I am asked as a Jungian

analyst who does analytic work with children, is how it fits in with a
psychology which is predominantly focused on adults in the
second half of life. Given all of the writings supporting this
viewpoint, this is a very legitimate question, and one that can be
best understood by examining Jung's own childhood and
adolescence. There is no quarrel that the bulk of Jung’s corpus is
centered on the apersonal or collective aspects of the adult psyche.
Yet, as one examines his earliest work carefully, one can find
clinical observations and ideas that reflect an uncanny prescience
of the psychological research that would later emerge regarding the
self and the mother-infant relationship. What appears to be the
case is that Jung was not comfortable exploring the psychological
terrain of infancy and early childhood due to his own experience. As
Brian Feldman has observed in his paper on Jung's childhood in the
Journal of Analytical Psychology CAP):
His depth psychology is less a psychology of interpersonal
relationships and their vicissitudes over time than it is a
psychology of the interior symbolic realm and internal
development. I think this is because he had to turn away from
the realm of interpersonal relating as an infant, and had to rely
upon his own self as a source of ongoing support.(01)

This description of Jung's relationship to his own childhood

offers a deeper understanding of his reluctance to study and work
with children. It is also a view that has been confirmed in his
writings and multiple other accounts of his life. His most
consistent views of children lie within the very limited scope of
their relationship to their parents. In one of his personal
communications with Michael Fordham, he makes the remark that
in the case of a difficult and troubled child he would "take the
mother by the years"' as a treatment. This attitude of considering
the parents as wholly responsible for the psychological health or
illness of their offspring lies at the core of his view of children. To
completely understand this perspective, however, it is important
to first place it in an historical and cultural context. Jung's theories,
as do anyone's, reflect the accumulated experience of the author's
life, both personal and professional, as well as the historical time in
which they are written. To do this, one must begin by looking at his
personal history and the culture into which he was born and raised.
Jung was born in the later years of the nineteenth century to a
modest Swiss family and was the only child in the family for nine
years until the birth of his sister. His father was a country cleric in a
small town and his mother was the daughter of a cleric. By all
accounts, the Jung marriage was not happy, and the birth of Carl
did not change that. While he recounts positive memories of his
mother in his autobiography, there is always the parallel reality of
her "otherworldly" or outright bizarre presence. He was a sickly
child with a variety of maladies including eczema, and was
accident-prone. There was an unexplained separation from his
mother at the age of three years, when she was hospitalized for
depression, which was emotionally disruptive, as well as a
complicated early age of his father's unhappiness with his work, and
having some sense of his inauthenticity with regard to being a
cleric. All of these facts add up to the clinical reality of a very
sensitive child experiencing enormous anxiety within his home
environment, with parents inadequate to the task of containing
him. Adding to this mix was the prevailing view of the time that
children needed to be trained, guided and socialized, with very little
attention paid to their emotional lives.' It is no surprise then that
Jung did not address the inner life of children in the bulk of this
theoretical work.
Although a history of childhood adversity can often be the
impetus for devoting oneself to working with children as a
reparative gesture, (this because a certain measure of healing and
peace can be cumulatively acquired through the repeated viewing
and/or re-experiencing the life of childhood), one who has
experienced a difficult early life may as easily seek to avoid things
reminiscent of that time. Jung would fall into this latter group. In
spite of this, however, he was to make several crucial observations
about the childhood psyche early in his career that would ultimately
provide the foundation of child analysis.
It is significant, I believe, that his earliest work was focused on
clinical material and drawn often from specific cases in his own
practice, as you will see in the following.
In the original 1912 work, The Psychology of the Unconscious,
which was later revised to become Symbols of Transformation in
1952, there is his discussion of a young woman patient who came
to him with a "catatonic depression and some psychosis." Jung writes
eloquently and presciently of the psychic life of the infant in the
chapter entitled "The Transformation of Libido." He observes:
We know that in infants the libido first manifests itself exclusively
in the nutritional zone, where, in the act of sucking, food is taken
in with a rhythmic movement. At the same time there develops in
the motor sphere in general a pleasurable rhythmic movement of
the arms and legs (kicking, etc.) With the growth of the individual
and development of his organs the libido creates for itself new
avenues of activity. The primary model of rhythmic movement,
producing pleasure and satisfaction, is transferred to the zone of
other functions, with sexuality as its ultimate goal. This is not to
say that the rhythmic activity derives from the act of nutrition.
(4)

He goes on to discuss the relationship of these infantile

behaviors with the eventual development of sexual libido and its
manifestation gradually over time culminating in puberty. These
observations were prompted by his clinical work with this particular
patient and indicate a level of awareness of infantile states that
would not be described nor written about until at least a decade
later by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. In treating his patient, it
was important for Jung to understand her primitive and regressive
behavior as having meaning for her survival and as having derived
from her earliest experiences. This attention to infantile life
reflects a deep and intuitive realization of the early personal origin
of individual psychic reality.
 Jung goes into some detail to distinguish two phases that
occur in early infancy and describes them as "the phase of
sucking and the phase of rhythmica activity in general.” He
traces the evolution the evolution of one into the others as part
of normal development and suggests that the process involves
the hand and other body parts, and the skin. He observes:
It (the hand) appears even more clearly as an auxiliary organ int
the phase of rhythmic activity, which then leaves the oral zone
and turns to other regions. Numerous possibilities now present
themselves. As a rule, it is the other body openings that
become the main object of interest; then the skin or special
parts of it; and finally rhythmic movements of all kinds.(5)

It is practically impossible to read this and not be struck by

the similarity to the early work of the developmental
pediatricians, psychologists, and child psychiatrists e.g. Daniel
Stern, who studied infancy through actually observing infants.
Jung goes on to talk about the concept of regression that
occurs when this normal course of development is disrupted,
which again presages the much later work of the attachment
theorists e.g. John Bowlby (6), Mary Ainsworth (7); Esther
Bick(8) and others. More recently, work in the area of eating
disorders and the adolescent self refers back to the issue of
infantile disruption of the mother-infant bond at crucial phases
being related to the development of later illness.
Jung concludes this subject by opining that: "The phase of
rhythmic activity generally coincides with the development of
mind gad speech” (9) He termed this the pre-sexual stage which
he theorized occurred between birth and four years of age. Again,
this represents an observation about the developing consciousness
of the child that was not addressed by she wider analytic
community for many years until Klein began to study symbol
formation in childhood in the late 1920s.
In his lecture on "Analytical Psychology and
Weltanschaung" its 1928, Jung acknowledged the primacy of the
relationship between the mother and infant. This was at a time
when Melanie Klein had just begun working with children
herself, and was considerably hampered by the prevalence of
the Oedipal conflict in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Again, one
is struck by the prescience of Jung's thinking about children in
this way in the absence of any clinical exposure to them.
However, it is probably this fact, as well, that would explain his
fuzzy thinking about the idea of a merged or fused sense of
identity for the infant with the mother. Michael Fordham
suggests that Jung was influenced by Rousseau's idealization of
children in his thinking about them. Whatever the cause, Jung
went on to develop the idea of a "participation mystique,” a notion
premised on a shared reality between mother and infant. I will say
more about this when we look at Neumann's work.
In this lecture, Jung also intimated the centrality of separation
from the mother as an essential component in human psychological
growth and maturation. This idea anticipated by forty years the later
seminal work of Margaret Mahler along with Pine and Bergman on
separation and individuation in infancy and toddlerhood. It is in
Symbols of Thansformation that Jung so elegantly alludes to the
difficulty of the struggle to separate from the mother. His perspective
by that time, however, is archetypal. He, thus, refers to these
developmental stages through a lens of his archetypal thinking.
Throughout his early work, one can see multiple examples of
the way in which he viewed children as, by necessity, needing to be
seen as individuals who contained the potential for maturation. As
Fordham observes in "Maturation of a Child Within The Family": "He
defined child development as ego growth, formulated the concept of
ego nuclei, and hinted at the self lying behind maturation of the
ego." (10)
However, it is important to place Jung historically regarding the
issue of children. He began writing in psychology at a time when
children were basically unconsidered in the culture at large. They
were chattel, not thought of as conscious creatures, and certainly
not studied in a psychological manner. With the observation of
young children and mothers in the Hampstead Nursery by Anna
Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in the 1940s, and by Donald
Winnicott and Michael Fordham at the Tavistock, ideas about
children began to be less theoretical and more grounded in reality.
During the Second World War, Winnicott and Fordham worked with
hundreds of children in the midst of the dual crises of displacement,
and loss of their parents who remained in London. It was the
beginning of the process of generating sound data about children's
psychic lives prospectively. This development continued and flowered
both here and abroad throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies. It
was during these years that individuals within the fields of child
psychiatry and psychology began to study infancy and childhood as
specific periods of development.
What has emerged from the study of infants and children is how
very unique they are from birth. Data drawn from clinical observation
in newborn nurseries, involving thousands of infants over many years,
has yielded unequivocal data about early infant typology. Anneliese
Korner's work at Stanford on infant development, originally published
in 1967, found that infants had unique and individually characteristic
responses at birth(11). Originally described as either "placid" or
"fussy" babies, based upon their ease of soothing, feeding, and other
similar parameters, studies indicate remarkable predictability over
time of such personal qualities. The idea that an infant is born with
his or her own absolutely original self seems indisputable. Within any
given family, with the same biological parents, infants appear utterly
different one from the other, and develop over time quite uniquely
and differently. Although the notion that the parental complexes
have an influence on the psychic lives of children is undoubtedly true,
it seems far less than was originally imagined. In clinical practice,
children are often brought for treatment due to the problems arising
out of type differences with the parents, a compelling illustration of
each child's uniqueness and individually.
James Astor seems to summarize the situation of Jung and
children best for me when he, in his introduction to Mara Sidoli and
Miranda Davies' book, Jungian Child Psychotherapy (12), observes that
there have been two stages in the history of the analytic study of
the child. The first of these involving the reconstruction of childhood
from memories, dreams, and recollections obtained from the analytic
records of adults. In this group would be Jung and Freud. The second
stage, which we are now in the middle of, would involve the direct
observation and study of the inner workings of the child. This would
include all of the child psychology data as well as studies of children in
psychoanalysis. In this group would be Michael Fordham of the Post-
Jungians, and a much larger field of Post-Freudians e.g. Klein,
Winnicott, Anna Freud and others.

The Post-Jungians and Child Analysis

Of the Jungian analysts who were working with children in the
early days, and were colleagues and followers of Jung, there are
three that deserve mention. These are: Frances Wickes, Erich
Neumann, and Michael Fordham, of whom the latter was far
and away the most prolific. In the 1950s and 60s, Dora Kalff
would develop a technique of child therapy, based on the work
of Margaret Lowenfeld, utilizing the sand tray. This she
entitled sandplay and developed her own interpretation of the
trays based on Lowenfeld, Jung, and Tibetan Buddhism. She was
working with Erich Neumann to tie the theoretical foundations
to his work but this could not be realized due to his untimely
death. Although there is no theoretical foundation supported by
findings in child development research, this technique has
gained great popularity as a play therapy tool in a variety of
child treatment settings. She wrote a book entitled: Sandplay:
Mirror of a Child's Psyche in 197l (13) Her son, Martin Kalff,
though not trained as a clinician, has further developed his
mother's ideas.

Frances Wickes
Frances Wickes was a Jungian analyst and a lay psychologist
who firmly believed in Jung's sense of a child's psychic reality
being primarily the product of the parental unconscious. She
wrote The Inner World of Childhood in 1927 (14). Wickes began
her studies with Jung in 1923 and fully subscribed to his belief
that the diffi culties of children could only be remedied by
addressing the unconscious conflicts of the parents. As Jung
states in his introduction to the book, "What this book provides
is not theory, but experience (15)”. Although Mrs. Wickes wrote
a few other books, none other dealt with childhood as
completely as her first. In the revised version, written in her
nineties and published in 1955, she follows up on her original
child therapy cases but without any obvious incorporation of
current child developmental theories.

Erich Neumann

Erich Neumann was a medical doctor and also had a Ph.D. in

psychology. He was born and trained in Berlin, then moved
to Tel Aviv in 1934. He was widely considered to be one of
Jung's most brilliant and gifted students and a later valued
colleague. He was a frequent lecturer in Europe through the
Eranos conferences, but was isolated in Israel until after the
war. His first publication Was Depth Psychology and the New
Ethic in 1949 (16), followed by his opus on the origin and
history of cousciousness and his masterpiece, The Great Mother (17).
In 1959, the The Child (18) which was first published
posthumously in German in 1963.

Neumann did not work with children, but wrote this book in
an eff ort to understand the baby's experience, and to place it
in an archetypal context. He beautifully describes the
relationship of the mother and baby, and makes many excellent
observations about the nature of it. There are a f ew central
observations of his, however, that have not stood the test of
time. Major among these is the notion that the infantile self
derives from the maternal self, rather than being a discrete
entity of its own. This represents a continuation of Jung's view
that the child was a repository of the parental complexes. It is
not difficult to imagine how he might have come to this
conclusion, i.e. that the self of the mother is so all
encompassing that it could be shared with the baby, if one
reads his earlier work on the great mother. In this
comprehensive and magnificent exposition on the goddess
mythology and archetypes, Neumann depicts the mother as an
immense force. In the absence of any experience with real
babies and children, and at a time in history when children were
just beginning to be studied, Neumann was operating in a
theoretical vacuum. In a 1959 paper in the JAP, he begins to
address the importance of the personal mother to the
psychological health oldie infant as follows:

Thus we know that the loss of the mother (without adequate

substitution) during the first year of the child's life can lead
to death, severe deterioration, and psychotic disturbances
whereas if the loss occurs after a normal primary relationship
in the earliest developmental period the chances of the child's
healthy development are much more promising...(19)

He went on to make an attempt to address the early

development of the psyche by proposing the concept of
"centroversion" as a way to explain the origin of individuation.
In his 1955 paper on narcissism, he opines as follows:

By 'centroversion we mean the psychic function which aims at

wholeness and leads to the formation of a conscious center ...a
kind of affiliate which the self sets up for itself...to represent
the interests of the whole in face of the demands of the inner
and outer worlds (20).

Neumann's ideas about centroversion, albeit incomplete,

seem to reflect a recognition of the need to extend the notion of
the self to the beginning of life. This thinking continues in the
later paper mentioned above. Unfortunately, Neumann died at
such a young age that he was unable to develop these ideas
further. Another limiting factor was his geographic isolation,
which cut him off from the growing study of infants and
children in the United States and Great Britain, as well as
within the larger analytic world.

MICHAEL FORDHAM

This brings us to Michael Fordham, who unlike Neumann,

lived to the hearty old age of ninety years and was writing
about infancy and childhood for the better part of those years.
 He was a psychiatrist and a student of Jung. He was born and
trained in England and was one of the founding members of the
Society of Analytical Psychology. He also established the first
child training program in London. Fordham was one of the
three editors of Jung's collected works, along with Gerhard
Adler, and was the founder of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.
He began his career as a psychiatrist in the Hampstead Child
Guidance Clinic seeing children and families, and had an
active clinical practice throughout his lice. He stressed Jung's
emphasis on empiricism and in his own work, always relied
upon clinical material to elucidate theoretical ideas. It was this
way of working that led him to question Jung's idea that the
unconscious of the child was the sum of the complexes of the
parents. This viewpoint did not seem compatible with what
Fordham was experiencing clinically with his patients.
Gradually, this discrepancy would lead him to develop his
own ideas about the childhood psyche, and to found the infant
observation program in London. When he died in 1995, he left
behind an enormous intellectual legacy of scholarship on
Jungian psychology.
Fordham's discovery of the self in childhood began with his
experience of their symbolic expressions, of mandalas, and of
powerful fantasies in his therapeutic work with children. The
drawing of a circle in a quite young child leading to their use of
the word "I", and a shift in development was very significant to
Fordham. Initially put off by the discovery that archetypes
were present in even quite young children, he gradually
developed a theory to explain their role in the child's psyc hic
development. He became intrigued by children's drawings, and
saw support in his thinking from the work of ethologists and
early developmental psychologists on innate releasers such as
Rene Spitz (21). This presence of archetypal elements in young
children which seemed to serve their development, was
counter to Jung's viewpoint that they could be harmful. As
Fordham became aware of processes operating in children that
could not be described as exclusively ego development, and
seemed rather to originate in the self, he began to consider the
possibility that individuation began at the very beginning of life.
This notion, however, was different than Jung's idea that the self
emerged only in the second half of life. Again drawing from his
clinical observations, Fordham hypothesized that an infantile or
primal self was present from birth and represented an original
state of integration. This self was thought to be an entity which
combined the totality of conscious and unconscious systems. This
primal self contained a potential energy activated by engagement
with its environment, beginning with its mother at birth. The
dynamics of this energy Fordham described as deintegration and
reintegration. Deintegration was the term used when referring to
the energy going outwards towards objects, and reintegration when
the energy was returning to the self. If one views the self as an
integrate in a steady state, it follows that some shift must occur
at birth to allow the infant to develop and adapt. The mechanism
of deintegration is one where in the former degree of wholeness
and stability is disrupted, allowing the self to deintegrate into
opposites that are psychophysiological in nature. This is based on
Jung's theory of psychic energy. They are creative and loving, on
the one hand, and aggressive and destructive on the other.
These energies are directed towards objects in the infant's
environment. Deintegration occurs at birth with the abrupt shift
from the intrauterine environment with its self-contained
system of nourishment, to the outside world. With the holding
and soothing of the infant within moments of birth, now known to
be vital to the infant's wellbeing, there is reintegration. Then the
infant experiences the sensation of hunger, an instinctual stimulus,
and this is another deintegration. Followed by the experience of a
successful feeding and there is the reintegration. Even before
birth, while in utero, the infant may experience deintegration
and reintegration. In normal development, this pattern can be
seen with the infant expressing the need for food, and being
lovingly fed; crying, and being soothed by the touch of the
mother; staring at the mother, and having the gaze lovingly
returned. Throughout the life of the infant and later the child,
alternating experiences of deintegration and reintegration allow
the growth and development of the self. The infant is maintaining
the core of the self while exploring the environment in order to
grow and mature. At the beginning, one observes this most
keenly in sensorimotor development. Over time, it is the
cumulative effect of these rhythmic experiences of deintegration
and reintegration which accounts for the infant's gradual
emotional growth, or individuation.

Although Jung and Fordham described contradictory

definitions of the ego's relationship to the self, both
conceptualized the self as the "integrator" of experience. For
Fordham, this begins with birth and the first encounters of the
baby with the mother. He referred to the parts of the self that
deintegrated as "deintegrates," and viewed the most significant
deintegrate of the self to be the ego. It is the ego that maintains .
1 continuity with the self in a dynamic fashion as the baby
increasingly interacts with the environment. For example, the
hungry baby's cry would be considered a deintegrate. It would
represent an instinctual expression that would attract the mother
for a feeding, the experience of which would allow reintegration
for the infant. Another way to imagine a deintegrate is as an
image with a potentially symbolic meaning for the infant, and
which could lead to the experience of reintegration. In a 1988
paper in Psychological Perspectives, Fordham notes:
"...deintegration and reintegration describe a fluctuating state of
learning in which the infant opens itself to new experience and
then withdraws in order to reintegrate and consolidate those
experiences (22)”. Over time, as the infant experiences positive
holding, soothing and care taking with the mother, there is a
gradual acquisition of sensorimotor data e.g. the feel of the
mother's skin, her smell, the sound of her voice, the sensati on
of voiding and excreting, the taste of milk. These all contribute to
the infant's attachment to the mother and the eventual
emergence of infantile ego as a deintegrate. It is at this point that
the early self-objects find representations in the ego and are
referred to as self-representations. I his marks the beginning of the
infant's awareness of self and other. But before I go on to this, let
me say something about self-objects. This term is used by
Fordham to describe certain parts of the infant's experience of the
environment as it relates to development. In his 1985 book,
Explorations into the Self: Fordham states:

When the object is mainly a record of reality, it may be called

a reality object; when it is mainly constructed by the self and
so records states of the self, made out of exteroceptive and
intcroccptive sense data, then it may be called a self-object...
It appears that self-objects increase in affectively charged
states, whilst in quiet contemplative exploring activities, real
objects predominate (23).

For example, things that the infant may obser ve casually in a room,
e.g. the curtains, a picture, a fleeting presence, these one would
consider reality objects. They are void of any affective charge. On
the other hand, those things that the infant has become more
attracted to in an emotionally charged manner so that the level
of engagement is more intense and sustained, these one would
consider self objects. For example, the mother's breast or skin,
her voice.
Fordham posited that initially an infant experiences identity
between subject and object which leads to the development of
self objects. As the ego appears, these self objects gain a greater
consciousness and are referred to as self representations. The
mechanism through which this growth occurs is the recurrent
deintegration and reintegration as the infant is engaged with
the greater world through the mother. As this continues, there is
a growing ability to distinguish between subject and object, and
a boundary begins to be formal. It is at this point that Fordham
considered the individuation process to begin. To quote James
Astor,
 This process of separating out 'me and 'not me' Fordham
thought of as the beginning of the individuation process.
This led to the infant's self helping to create the environment
in which it developed, whether by evocative actions which
elicited an empathic response from its mother or by its own
sensitivity to what its mother could bear (24).

So let us look at the mother and the infantile self together.

From birth forward, the intimate bonding established between
the mother to emerge and flourish. It is through this deep
empathic connection that the mother-infant couple finds its
rhythm. Through the holding, soothing, gazing and other care
taking activities involved, the mother and baby establish a
mutual language of feeling. This understanding underlies the
responsiveness which the mother develops to her infant's
various needs and feeling states as maturation proceeds.
Data from the attachment theorists, ethologists, and
developmental psychiatrists and psychologists [think Ainsworth
(25), Bowlby (26), Spitz(27) ] as well as the developmental
pediatricians (Stern") supports this view. It is the active
engagement of the baby with the mother which created the
nurturing environment of the mother-infant couple and allows
individuation to progress. Feldman refers to the notion of a
“relational archetype" as a model for this dynamic (29). He
observes, "At birth, the relational archetype forms the basis for
early bonding and attachment experience." He goes on to
compare this, in classical Jungian terms, to the mother-infant
couple as a coniunctio.
As the relationship evolves over time, the infant becomes
increasingly more able to self soothe through the utilization of
self-representations and one observes the beginnings of
symbolization. The actual dating of this experience is not
particularly relevant, and varies widely depending upon who you
read. Feldman, for example, feels that it begins at birth as the
skin represents the boundary for the infant of inside and
outside, or inner and outer. Fordham and others sec it as a more
gradual process, the capacity for which occurs over time. Astor
observes: "A significant attribute of symbol formation is that
experiences, in order to become symbolized, must have a life
over time; they must have occurred sufficiently often for them
to have continuity of existence in the infant's mind (30).

Although a central feature of Jungian psychology involves

symbolic expression through the archetypes (31) (think Man and
His Symbols), Jung himself did not explore the origins of the
symbolic process. This task was taken up by the early
psychoanalysts who studied children, mainly Melanie Klein and
Donald Winnicott. Jung did, however, fi nd the idea that
children could think symbolically an interesting one. When
Michael Fordham shared with Jung his sense that children
were able to make and use symbols from an early age, he was
encouraging of his continued study. In The Self and Autism (32),
Fordham devotes an entire chapter to the subject of
symbolization in infancy. He begins by defining a symbol as
something that is unknown, as opposed to a sign. And he further
states, that it is something that cannot be made fully
conscious. A symbol is thought to have many meanings and a
sense of aliveness that acts as a "powerful stimulus to
consciousness"(33). Fordham observes that: "A powerful source
of the plurality of meanings of the symbol is that it combines
opposites, transcends them, and so unites them and refers to
the self. This is its synthetic function” (34).

In infancy, the infant is presented with the experience of the

mother after birth that allows the cycle of deintegration-
reintegration to occur. At first, these experiences of the mother
arc vague, but they gradually deepen and become more
complex as consciousness develops.
They begin as self objects wherein the imagery is not
differentiated from the objects themselves and the infant
identifies with them. At this early stage, the self objects simply
represent the needs of the infant that a mother meets and
satisfies. These represent symbolic thoughts, but do not rise to
the level of symbols. As neurological development proceeds,
allowing a greater degree of discrimination, and the ego
begins to emerge, there arrives the capacity for symbol
formation. It is a very gradual process with the experience of
symbolization at first being fleeting. Over time, as experiences
are repeated, there is a reliability that develops which allows
the infant to consistently make and use symbols. This evolution
evolution continues into childhood as the child later acquires
the capacity for abstract thinking.
Michael Fordham addresses the process of moving from self
objects to symbolization in The Self and Autism as follows:

In order to create a symbol the self object must be destroyed,

otherwise the urgent need for a creative act is not brought
into being; since the breast as a self object is destroyed, while
the real breast is still in existence, the constructive act can take
place only in another way, by abstraction from the object - the
abstraction being the symbol. (35).

As the infant develops into the toddler and small child, with
the ego firmly in place, one can observe the use of objects
symbolically as a way to manage reality, inner and outer. This
is in addition to the employment of projective identification, at
first with the mother, and later with others in the infantile
environment. Fordham viewed projective identification as a
normal process and as a step towards wholeness in
development. It is that action of the psyche where some part of
the self is unconsciously put onto another in an effort to relieve
oneself of the part, or to force the other to experience one's own
feelings. One can sec this operating in the mother-infant pair, and
equally well in the analysand pair.

Summary
There is a rich history of Jung's own writings about the psychic
life of the child that inspired Michael Fordham to further develop
this area of Jungian theory, always based on clinical experience.
Over the past several decades, infant studies and research have
born out many of his observations, further bolstering the
theoretical foundations of a uniquely Jungian understanding of
children. This, in turn, led to the development of Jungian child
analysis, with the emphasis being always on the child in
relationship to his early life and to the analyst through the
transference. Others, such as Dora Kalff, who worked with
children using sand tray figures, emphasized the purely
symbolic meaning of the figures, developing her own ideas about
the meaning of their placement, but to many, seen as diluting
the intimacy of the analyst-analysand bond necessary for the
formation of a successful analytic union.

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