Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 677–697

James Astor in conversation with

Warren Colman

James Astor, London

Warren Colman, St. Albans

Abstract: In this interview with Warren Colman, James Astor speaks about his development
as a Jungian analyst from his own experience of personal analysis in the 1960s to his recent
retirement from clinical practice. The discussion covers his long association with Michael
Fordham, the child analytic training at the SAP, the infant observation seminars with
Fordham and Gianna Henry through which Fordham was able to make new discoveries
about infant development, his experience of supervision with Donald Meltzer and the
development of his own thinking through a series of papers on the analytic process, supervision
and the relation between language and truth. The interview concludes with reflections about
the legacy of Michael Fordham and the future of analytic work.

Key words: child analytic training, Donald Meltzer, Michael Fordham, infant observation,
Society of Analytical Psychology

Warren Colman: I’m looking forward to this interview with you because you’ve
been an important figure in the Society of Analytical Psychology for the past
thirty years. You’ve been very important in both the adult training and the
child training, through your own writing and because of your deep connection
to Michael Fordham. I’d like to start by asking about your early influences,
how you first became interested in psychology and how you found your way to
becoming a Jungian analyst.

0021-8774/2013/5805/677 © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5922.12044
678 James Astor and Warren Colman

James Astor: The answer to how I became a Jungian analyst is ‘gradually’

because I went into analysis in the early ʼ60s coming out of a troubled adolescence.
And I was referred to somebody called Ruth Campbell who was a very skilful
analyst and who knew how to manage an adolescent. And she managed to engage
me in a process, which became an analysis. It took quite a few years but we had
altogether about 12 years of which seven were five times a week analysis until
she died in 1974. And I didn’t know she was a Jungian.

WC : So you found your way into it through being in analysis, rather than from
coming into a profession and then going into analysis.
JA : I came into it because I had experienced what we would call a transference
cure. I had become completely fascinated by the process through having
experienced it. And I was working in television. I was making television
programmes for a programme called Man Alive and was a reporter on
that. And we were making lots of programmes about social issues. And
as my analysis deepened I became aware that the most meaningful thing
for me was to pursue this and train as an analyst. And that’s what I did.

I had to get the appropriate experience since I was working in the television
industry. So I had to go to a hospital, the one in Watford [Schrodells], where I
attended the psychiatry department. I went to the Mildred Creak Unit at Great
Ormond Street. I attended Dr. Bentovim’s diagnostic seminars there. But more
importantly, I thought I had to have a fundamental education in our discipline.
So I became a course associate at the Tavistock in the early ʼ70s and took the Freud
reading seminars, Dr. Turquet’s seminars, John Padel’s seminars until I had got up
to speed with basic Freud, basic Klein. I didn’t feel I could come into a
Jungian training without understanding what Freud had been pioneering and the
body of his work. I didn’t see how you could parachute into the Jungian world if
you didn’t know what fascinated Jung about Freud.

WC : And did you do both the child training and the adult training?
JA : I started with the child training, which was quite intensive in that we had
to have three cases once a week, two intensive child cases five times a week
and an adult, a mother of a child, also five times a week. And as I was
progressing through that, I realized that unless I was going to work
exclusively in the health service, I would need to do an adult training
because I wouldn’t be able to sustain a private practice with child work.
So I applied part of the way through my child training to do the adult
training and that involved taking on another adult case and doing some
more seminars. But you could do all of that in a much more concertinaed
form than you can now. The whole process was spread over about four
years. The cases went on a bit longer but the training seminars went on
for four years.
The JAP Interview 679

WC : And that was right at the beginning of the child training? Were you in the
first cohort?
JA : I was one of the first trainees from that programme which developed
under the guidance of Michael Fordham. I became a member of the
society in ‘78, a professional member in ‘82 and a training analyst in ‘88.
WC : So was it when you started the child training that you first met Michael
Fordham?
JA : Michael Fordham was the person who referred me to Ruth Campbell.
WC : Ah, so you’d known him?
JA : I hadn’t known him. I’d gone for one interview to the Precinct. Sat either
side of the fireplace in that extraordinary smoke-filled room.
WC : Where was the Precinct?
JA : It was St. Katherine’s Precinct where he had a house on a lease off the Crown
Estate on the edge of Regent’s Park. It was two doors up from [E.A.]
Bennett’s house and his house and his consulting room looked over Regent’s
Park with a big desk looking at Regent’s Park. When you went into the room
there was a cloud of smoke lying across the room because he smoked all
through the sessions. It was the first psychological interview I’d had with
anybody and I had no clue what was expected of me. And at the end of it
all he suggested I went to see Ruth Campbell and that was how it began. I
didn’t see him again until I was thinking of doing my training and that
coincided with the death of Ruth Campbell. So I had a bit of a problem.
I’d had what I thought was enough analysis. I mean I thought we’d done
the job really. But you had to be in analysis for your training. So I said to
him, ‘How do we play this one? What do we do?’ And he said, ‘Hmm,
well you’d better come and see me’. So I said ‘Well, all right, but
I’m not coming five times a week. Those days are over’. And he said
‘Hmm—three?’ I said ‘That’s all right, three’. So for two and a bit years I
went to see him three times a week until my training was done. I should
say, there was a gap, obviously, after the death of my analyst and before
starting with Fordham.
WC : So does that mean that your relationship with him as an analyst was a bit
different than it might have been in standard analysis because you had
already, effectively had your analysis and so you were on slightly different
terms?
JA : Yes, I’d had quite a lot of analysis so I had a sense of what the task was. There
was obviously work to be done of a mourning kind. And there was also some
work to be done within the paternal transference. But what was strange, of
course, once I’d done that, I was then very quickly in a collegial relationship
with him. I was being taught by him. Initially I thought that was going to be
rather difficult but it turned out not to be because he was very skilful at that
680 James Astor and Warren Colman

transition from treating somebody as a patient to treating them as a

junior colleague.
WC : And what were the other important influences in your training?
JA : Well, my first supervisor was Mary Williams who was responsible, you
may recall, for that little adage that I think is an absolute essential concept
of the SAP, about the relationship between the collective and personal
unconscious.1 Fred Plaut was a supervisor. Dorothy Davidson was a
supervisor. Michael Fordham brought in for the child cases somebody called
Jess Guthrie, who seems to have slightly disappeared from history. She was
a very experienced child psychotherapist. But as an early member of the
training I had to go elsewhere for infant observation. I went to Isca
Wittenberg’s Tavistock seminar, which was very lively because I found
myself fighting off these Kleinian perceptions of small children. So I
had a very engaging time with that.
WC : That reminds me of my own experience of working at the Tavistock next
door and coming over here for my training2 and continually bridging the
two. It’s similar but different.
JA : Exactly. And this is what interested me about the infant observation. I
thought at least the group can combine around material, I mean there it
is, there’s the observation. I found that more fruitful in casework rather
than the observation work. Because in the observation work, I felt the
material was being driven into a pattern. In the casework, on the other
hand, you had much more to work with because you had the analyst’s
own experience, which enabled us to talk more about the self and things
that are important to us.
WC : So were you working as a child psychotherapist by this time?
JA : Yes, I took a training post at Weavers Field School in Hoxton. In those
days they were called schools for maladjusted children. It was a sort of a
junior academy of crime. Very, very lively and run by a very imaginative
headmistress. And I was the psychotherapist there and the post was split
between that and the child guidance clinic in Hoxton. The children didn’t
appreciate being sent to me. It was a bit like saying to them that they’d
got to go to the funny farm and see that strange person. So very quickly I
got into a different way of working, which was to work through the staff.

1
‘Nothing in the personal experience needs to be repressed unless the ego feels threatened by its
archetypal power; and second: The archetypal activity which forms the individual’s myth is dependent
on material supplied by the personal unconscious’ (Williams 1963, p. 47).
2
Since 1982, the SAP has been located in a building adjacent to the Tavistock Centre in London.
Previously it was in Devonshire Place, near Regent’s Park.
The JAP Interview 681

I would work with the teachers—listening to them, talking to them

about the children and how they thought of the difficulties the children
were bringing and what sort of dynamics were going on in the group
and in the classroom. And that turned out to be the work that was most
fruitful.
WC : So you became a kind of consultant?
JA : I became a consultant within the organization. And that worked much
better than trying to see the children individually. You can imagine—they
couldn’t provide a consulting room off the school premises so I had a room
within the school. The children going past it would knock on the door and
make comments about what was going on behind it. It wasn’t a place that
was conducive to a reflective psychotherapeutic approach to individual
work.That went on until 1977 when I transferred to the child psychiatry
department of Charing Cross Hospital where Manny Lewis ran a
department, which had long historical connections with the obstetric and
child development departments. It was a lively and interesting place. But
what I found myself doing was more of this consultancy work, and working
on a special project on functional infertility started by Mike Pawson, an
obstetrician specializing in infertility. I’m veering more towards working
with adults, doing consultation, doing teaching. And that was what I was
discovering about myself.
WC : So you were discovering what you were interested in and what you
wanted to do.
JA : Yes, my reflection was that I had done the child analytic training because
I thought it was the best training available at that time. And that I
needed to understand actual children before I could understand the child
inside the adult.
WC : What was going on in the child analytic training at this time and how did
that develop?
JA : The formal development of the child analytic training began with the
establishment of the CAT [Child Analytic Training] Committee and with
Michael becoming director of training, but much of a less formal kind
had been going on within the Society for years through the Children’s
section. He retired in ‘85 and there had been put in place a succession
procedure, which was that the course tutor would then become the director
of training when the director of training retired and would bring on a
new course tutor. So Fordham had set up a succession model, which was
designed to produce continuity. But it was also based on the idea there
would be a leader …
WC : And you would have been that person?
682 James Astor and Warren Colman

JA : I was the course tutor, involved in the curriculum with the students and,
most important of all, liaising with the ACP.3 So I would have stepped up
to be the director of training for three years. Somebody else would
have become a course tutor who would have taken on the role that I
did. That didn’t happen because there was a small group of people on
the committee who decided they wanted to have a committee within a
committee to run the training, not an individual. That produced a crisis,
which Dorothy Davidson went to see Michael about and offered to step
in and be Chair. She was a very facilitating and helpful person and much
respected. The three of us had a number of discussions—Fordham, Dorothy
Davidson and myself—as to how we should proceed. And Fordham said
‘Do you want to fight this? Do you want to make an issue of it?’ And I said
no, I didn’t. I said, if there are a group of people on the committee who want
to do it this way, let them do it. They invited me to join them and I said I
didn’t want to join them. I didn’t think a committee within a committee
was the way to run an organization. But what I would do is, I’d go on
teaching, analysing and being an active member of the child analytic
training, but they had made a decision about how the training should be
run. So they should do that. And that is what happened. And it was a great,
great relief to me not to be doing the administration. And it was, I think, a
disappointment to Fordham that this had happened but he came round to
it, and it ended up with Jane Bunster running the training, until Elizabeth
Urban and Miranda Davies took it over following Jane’s death. Jane would
come to see me quite regularly and ask me if I would please come back
because she felt I was outside of it, which was true, I was outside of it.
And I said no, I wouldn’t come back, but I would always be there as a
presence for the teaching of the curriculum and the students but I wouldn’t
come back as part of the administration. I didn’t share her confidence in this
committee within a committee arrangement.
WC : It sounds like one of these typically unpleasant conflicts in analytical
organizations but actually it sounds as if it happened without there being
a terrible split, perhaps because you were willing to step aside.
JA : Yes, I mean when the Dauphin stands up and says he’s going to be the next
king the knives go thudding into his back. [Laughter]. That’s what happened.
WC : Yes, I believe Fordham used the phrase, it was a blood bath?
JA : He did say that in an interview with Roger Hobdell, yes.
WC : So you decided your life wasn’t worth…?

3
The Association of Child Psychotherapists - the national body for child psychotherapy in Britain.
The JAP Interview 683

JA : Well, it would be very difficult to lead an organization where people were

actively not showing any confidence in your leadership … I’d much
rather concentrate on the content, on the work, on the patients and
developing our model. I was the face of our training in relation to the
ACP because Fordham didn’t go to all these meetings and conferences
and so on. I was giving a lot of talks and papers on the differences
between child and adult analysis, on individuation, on the SAP model
and so on. It was a little bit awkward because the ACP wanted to have
balance so they invited somebody from the Anna Freud, one of the
Kleinians and then they felt ‘well, we’ll ask the SAP too’, and up pops this
recently qualified young man. And the more senior colleagues from the
other organizations are wondering why they’re sharing a platform with this
young whippersnapper who’s just been qualified. So it was a little bit
awkward to begin with.
WC : I believe the other thing that was going on around this time was the
infant observation seminar that Michael Fordham was in with Gianna
Henry that enabled him to test out his ideas about deintegration and
reintegration.
JA : This was the most exciting, the most thrilling part of the training.
Fordham was disappointed that the students had been coming back to
him from their own infant observation and were not as thrilled as he
thought they should be at what they were seeing. And they didn’t appear
to be reporting on what he hoped they would be discovering. So he
instigated these big seminars with Gianna Henry, which came to be called
Marathon Seminars. They happened monthly in Devonshire Place. And
all the people who were interested went. Ann Brown presented a little
baby, Baby N, which has been written about by Fordham (1985). And
those were absolutely thrilling seminars, because Fordham was getting so
excited at seeing something, which he had postulated as early as 1944,
unfold in front of his eyes; here we were in 1979 and here he was seeing
it and hearing about it. It was a very, very rich and thrilling time to be at
the SAP and the child training.
WC : When you say he was seeing it, that’s something I always find intriguing
because one of the difficulties with infant observation is knowing where
the dividing line is between observation and speculation. So how much
was it possible to show that that was what was actually going on?
Or was this simply a way of making sense of the data?
JA : Well, the way Fordham conducted the seminar with Gianna Henry, we
felt we were discovering something. We felt we were seeing something
in the material. And it felt as if what we were seeing came out of the
discussion that we were all having and people were feeling their way
684 James Astor and Warren Colman

towards what we thought was going on. My experience of my own infant

observation was that I was being taught to see something and that was
qualitatively a different experience.
WC : So this was much more a process of mutual discovery.
JA : That’s what it felt like. Because you mustn’t forget that Fordham
deliberately kept his model very empty so we could fill it with the material
that was coming from the observer. We were given a copy of the observer’s
notes and then we would just start to work on it together as a group.
Gianna Henry had had a Jungian background before she became a Kleinian
child analyst. She was very familiar with our world, which helped. It really
did feel as if we were watching something unfold. And that was what made
it so exciting and so interesting. Fordham was thrilled by it. It really was
very important and led to major revisions in his model. The Fordham of
the autism period is quite a different Fordham from the Fordham of
the later years where he has had the experience of the infant observation
and he’s quite emphatically saying that the early relationship with
the mother is not a primordial relationship, it’s not a special relationship
in that way. And he’s saying that participation mystique is not a
characteristic of infancy. It’s an achievement later on. Mothers may
go in and out of states of fusion but the child’s self is not carried by
the mother. And he’s spelling it out much more clearly than he did in
the early days.
WC : And that was something that came out of the observations?
JA : And that came out of the infant observation. As with all the things with
Fordham, the major work is clinically led. It always comes out of ‘what
did I find in the consulting room’.
WC : It’s impressive that somebody who’s held a theory for a long time can
revise it in that way. But it’s even more impressive that somebody of his
age is still able to go on thinking in a new and creative way and change
his mind. That’s very impressive.
JA : Yes, I absolutely agree. I think that was a remarkable feature, that and his
extraordinary ability to conceptualize material. He would have these
experiences and then he could think them into a formulation and, not just
loyally but intellectually and meaningfully, connect it to Jung. That was
his remarkable talent. He was a man of many, many talents but those were
the ones you noticed in the teaching. His teaching method enabled you to
discover; that was what was so enjoyable about it, rather than you were
being told.
WC : And was that because there was a sense of being with somebody who was
themselves in a process of discovery?
JA : Absolutely, yes.
The JAP Interview 685

WC : So again he wasn’t sort of teaching you from on high, but was working
with you.
JA : Exactly that. I don’t know whether people who didn’t know him or came
from the outside experienced him like that. But certainly those of us who
worked with him over a number of years found that to be how he was. He
was very open-minded and would be led by the material that you brought,
which was why he was such an interesting supervisor. And he also recognized
in this context when you didn’t know. My supervisory experience of going to
different supervisors came out of that experience with him, taking the
material to him, and he would say ‘I don’t think I can help you with this
one. I’ve reached the limit of my knowledge with this case. You need
another way of framing it’, which is modest and is very dignified. He wasn’t
somebody who was omnipotent.
WC : He did have another side to him, I gather, because I hear people saying he
could be quite brusque, that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, that sort of thing.
JA : All true.
WC : Was it different if you knew him well or was that just always a part of
him?
JA : It might depend on who you were and how well you knew him. But I
think not suffering fools is an attribute that many very able people have:
how much time do you want to spend bringing people up to speed before
you can have a conversation with them? Probably not a lot, as you get
older particularly.
WC : When you think of all the different things he did—he was doing his own
papers, editing the Collected Works, which is a huge thing and at the same
time running the training. I mean it’s phenomenal really the kind of energy
he must have had and the speed at which he must have worked.
JA : Well he would see his patients. He’d have a meal. He would go to the
SAP (Committee or teaching). He would come back. He would do
two hours’ work at his desk on the Collected Works or a paper he was
doing and then he would go to bed. And that was his regular working
routine for years and years and years. He had a lot of stamina.
Remember he was a big, strong man. He kippered himself with that dreadful
pipe he smoked all the time but he did have a lot of energy, a lot of energy.
I once asked him towards the end of his life whether he would give up
smoking as his doctors urged him to and he said no he loved his pipe
too much.
WC : And so you gradually became closer to him through working with him over
the years?
JA : First there was analysis with him. Then I was the course tutor working with
him. And then I would see him from time to time and take cases to him and
686 James Astor and Warren Colman

discuss things with him. And then when he moved to the country permanently
and Frieda was becoming very ill and required quite a lot of nursing, he would
come and stay with us when he needed a break. It was during this period that
we became much closer. He would arrange for somebody to care for her
because it was very stressful for him to look after her. She was becoming really
very blind and infirm and needed a lot of looking after, which he wanted to do
but it was very tiring.
I started writing the book quite a bit later on, towards the end of his life,
while also helping him revise Children as Individuals. I said I would do the book
over quite a long period of time. The book was part of a series that Routledge
were doing on Makers of Modern Psychotherapy.4 Well again that was slightly
awkward because Mara Sidoli had said she wanted to do it and Routledge had
agreed, subject to Michael’s approval. And she went to see Michael and said
‘I’m going to do this book’. And he said ‘I want James to do it’, which was very
nice for me but it wasn’t so nice for Mara.
So I said, of course I’d be pleased to do it because I knew his work inside
out. I’d read everything he’d written and I knew a lot of his early work. But
what it meant was that I could organize it and systematize it and tell a story
and show the development. Because if you don’t know his work you don’t
know how the model changes and you don’t know what the development is. I
would write a chapter and send it to him and then we would meet. I would
go to Severalls.5 My wife Jane would make a meal, which I would bring
over. He always liked wine so he would drink wine at lunchtime. We’d work
on the chapter, have a meal, and then I’d go back re-energized, revise, re-write
and then we’d do it again. And that was the pattern that went on because I was
writing this book in the holidays. I would sort of fiddle about with the text during
the week and the weekends but the real work had to be done in the holidays. I had
to have a concentrated period. Not brilliant for family life that sort of work—you
have to have a very tolerant and patient spouse and children who know not to
interrupt you too much. That was the pattern for three years or so but it was
a lovely time for me because I got to know him very well.
What came out of it for me is that it’s both a teaching book and also a book
about the development of the SAP. It’s about how we started off trying to be
good ‘Jungians’ and discovered that we had to take the transference
into consideration, we had to modify our technique, we had to incorporate
clinical knowledge from other sources. We had to develop a society with rules
that were independent from those of other Jungian organizations with different
models for training. And all of this is telling the story of Fordham’s development.
That was my experience anyway.
4
Michael Fordham: Innovations in Analytical Psychology. (Astor 1995).
5
Fordham’s house at Jordans, near Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire.
The JAP Interview 687

WC : It’s one of the things I sometimes think about in relation to both the
Society and the Journal and more broadly the developmental school of
analysis. How much is this identified with Fordham?
JA : Fordham would never, ever call the SAP a developmental school. He and
Andrew [Samuels] used to have little exchanges about this. I mean
Andrew’s categorization from his first book has stuck so presumably it
resonates with people around the world and says something to them. But
Fordham said all good analysis is developmental. We are not just a
developmental school. We’re Jungians who have incorporated
psychoanalytic knowledge, made links with Bion and who have treated
the child internally as an embodied real experience of our patients, not
as a symbolic one. We’re not developmentalists. Good analysis is
synthetic. He said it all goes together—good analysis, good reductive
analysis is synthetic. It’s all part of the same game.
WC : Was there conflict in the Society between different views about what
analysis should be and the sort of things that Andrew Samuels was trying
to characterize in creating this model of different schools?
JA : Well within the society there was vigorous discussion. There was always a
very, very lively forum and a lot of discussion. There wasn’t Fordham
dominating. There was a lively collegial atmosphere. It wasn’t a point of
view being rammed through. The only construction of Michael
Fordham’s that everybody one way or another did sign up to was the
concept of deintegration and reintegration. I think that that has gone
around the world. Other aspects perhaps, each to their own discovery
really. So, yes, there were differences but there weren’t differences that
drew lines, which people couldn’t cross over, with the exception of
Adler who felt he had to leave the SAP. It was part of being in a lively
atmosphere. All of that makes up the SAP. I think that tradition was
established very early on and it has continued.
WC : We’ll come back to the wider influence of the SAP and Michael Fordham
but I want to pick up how your own work developed out of this very
creative synthesis. Earlier you were talking about giving a lot of
talks and papers in the child psychotherapy world in the ’80s but you
don’t seem to have started publishing your own papers until around the
late 1980s?
JA : That’s right. I was looking at the list of those early papers and I don’t
have any of them. I’d love to know what I wrote. None of them were
published. In the main I was responding to a request. I’d go and talk
and be part of a discussion. It wasn’t for posterity.
WC : So how did you think about writing for publication?
688 James Astor and Warren Colman

JA : The child analysts decided we had to put out a book about the child
training. So I was asked to write the introduction setting out what our
child training was. This was a book edited by Miranda Davies and Mara
Sidoli (1988). So that got me trying to synthesize what my knowledge
was at that point. That’s where it got started and I went on from there.
And then from 1989 to ’91 I was on the editorial committee of the
Journal of Child Psychotherapy so I was getting involved in thinking
about how papers are structured. So I was getting more focused on
writing. It was partly also that I was no longer having to do any
administration. And that was a big help. And also it was learning the
‘game’ of publication. I mean, you learn how to shape an article which
can be published and what the requirements are. At first you struggle
with your astonishment that when your writing comes back covered in
red ink you still feel like that little boy who’s got his prep back and he
hasn’t done very well. And then begins a process of shaping it again,
and that’s what I call playing the game. This has led to some of the later
papers I wrote about the process and experience of writing analytic
papers.
WC : In the early papers there seems to be a very strong influence from Donald
Meltzer’s work.
JA : When we were doing the child analytic training, Michael Fordham
introduced us to Donald Meltzer because he wrote a commentary on
Richard, Mrs. Klein’s big case. I thought his way of thinking was quite
fascinating. So as part of my education I joined an ACP seminar run by
Alberto Hahn in the late ’80s where we systematically read Studies in
Extended Metapsychology, Sexual States of Mind and The Aesthetic
Experience. At that time Meltzer was giving seminars to the ACP
students, anybody who wanted to turn up at his house in Highgate where
he was revising, in public, his books, in particular Sexual States of Mind.
And he later did The Analytic Process as well. So I was getting quite a lot
of input from him from a teaching point of view plus being part of the
seminar group. And what happened was, I had a particularly difficult
case, which I wrote about—it was one of my first publications, I used
the material in two papers. That was one which I had taken to Fordham
and he had said that he couldn’t help me with it. So I called Meltzer. I
didn’t know him—he was very open—he didn’t say ‘who sent you or
who are you?’ or anything. He just said yes, come. And I went to his
consulting room in the basement of his house in Highgate. It was just after
his wife, Martha Harris, had had the terrible car accident which led to her
premature death and she was upstairs being looked after by him and he
The JAP Interview 689

was very, very tired. The consulting room was like a tunnel. And the
supervisee would sit in the analyst’s chair and Meltzer would take
another chair and sit opposite. And I sat down in his chair with my
material and I started talking. And he started to fall asleep as I was talking
to him. And I knew that he often did this and then he’d come out of the
sleep and say something and you’d think, how did he hear that? Where
did he get that from? So I’m burbling away with my material, this
eminent man sitting opposite me, he looked like a little wise monkey.
And he was smoking this very thin white cigarette and it drops out of
his hand and it’s burning the carpet. And I don’t know what to do—do
I keep on talking? I mean, is he going to burn the place, what are we going
to do? It’s burning a hole in the carpet. So I stop. And my stopping my
voice wakes him up like that, you see. And then he picks his fag up and
on we go. That was my introduction to supervision with Meltzer.
I went to see Donald Meltzer for eight or nine years. He moved to Oxford. I
used to go down and see him in the evening and the supervision there was quite
different. It was in his kitchen. I’d come in about half past seven in the evening.
There’d be the remnants of a meal, which he’d press upon you. There’d be a
bottle of wine which he would be sipping. When I came in he would be reading
something. I’d say, ‘Don, what are you reading?’ He said ‘I’m reading
Shakespeare. I’m reading King John’. I said, ‘That’s a play I haven’t seen.
Why are you reading Shakespeare?’ He said ‘To improve my expression, find
better ways of saying things’. And then he’d say ‘Now what have you brought?’
And we’d sit and we’d talk. And just before I’d go, he’d have a patient who’d
come in and go into the back of the house and off he’d go. He was working until
10 o’clock at night at that period in his life. He worked very, very long hours and
charged very modest fees.
I learned a great deal from him about how to manage the very powerful early
embodied affective life of patients as they present in analysis. And I learned a
lot about what he wrote about in The Psychoanalytic Process. Although I
have to say when I reviewed it again very recently for the British Journal of
Psychotherapy, I did say that I thought that his language in that book and his
language of interpretation was very archaic sounding now. And all those many
joined up words and embodied talk is not the way you can talk to a patient.
And I used to go away from his seminars even then thinking, ‘well, I
understand what you’re saying but I can’t say that to my patients. I simply can‘t’.
But it was fruitful. I was grateful to him. He was an interesting person. We
became quite close friends. I used to see quite a lot of him and then I moved on
to other supervisors who taught me other things. I’ve always, always had
supervision during my analytic practice. I’ve never been part of a group of
colleagues. I preferred to do it that way. I’ve always thought it’s necessary for
me to be able to hear what I say and, in saying it, I hear it in a different way.
690 James Astor and Warren Colman

And then of course the person who’s listening hears it in a completely different
way and then I would go away and digest that and that’s how I kept as alert
as possible. There is so much stuff that you cannot process in any analytic
interview and need help with. I think supervision kept me sane and this was
certainly Meltzer’s point of view—that the analyst was the one who was really
at risk in the analytic process, that you are the one who’s putting out a part of
yourself, what Fordham called making available a deintegrate from the self. And
then how this combines with your patient and what happens then exposes you to
a lot of quite toxic material.

WC : You’ve also written quite a lot about the process of supervision.

JA : Yes, there are two or three papers but the first paper was about the
institutional pressure and the difficulty of finding a way of saying what
you meant and not feeling that you are just parroting what you’re
supposed to say. What I consider to be the bigger paper was the one on
empathy, in which I gave more clinical examples.
WC : I think one of the things that comes out in those papers and also in your
subsequent papers is something about the importance of finding an
authentic voice with the patient.
JA : Which comes out of the relationship you have with the supervisee and
what’s going on in the session. It’s often derived from those moments
of interaction during the meeting rather than necessarily seeing what was
going on. And that came out of proceeding analytically in the supervision
without being the analyst of the supervisee. So you’re listening to yourself
and your own responses to what they’re saying as well as listening to the
detail of the material.
WC : One of the things I noticed in tracking the development of your papers is
that it did seem to me you do find your own voice more in the later
papers. I think it might be in that reciprocity and empathy paper where
you say ‘in the old days we used to interpret in terms of part-objects
but now we talk in terms of functions’. And actually I think ‘in the old
days’ probably referred only to a decade ago but there was a real
difference in the way you seem to be writing then. It seemed to be more
your own by that time.
JA : I think that is inevitable, isn’t it, in an analyst’s development, that they
gradually do find their own voice and find a way of speaking out of the
experiences they’ve had and how it has changed them. It’s not using your
personality, it’s using the changes that have been brought about in your
personality through doing the analytic work. That’s what happens.
WC : Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. Well, let’s come on to the paper
you wrote about Fordham and his patient K., ‘Fordham, Feeling and
Countertransference’, because that seems to have been an important
The JAP Interview 691

experience of that kind of development for you as well as for the patient.
It was also a very interesting statement and a very brave statement, I
think, about Michael Fordham.
JA : The first thing to be said about that paper is that the work with K. was
unlike any work I’d ever done with anyone before and it was not an
analysis. K. makes that clear in his comments about it and I make it clear,
too, in what I’ve written. So it was a very unusual experience and
particular to K. But what it allowed me to do was to examine something
that this material revealed, which was a blind spot that I thought was in
the material. And that was a very difficult thing to find a way of talking
about it without being disrespectful or disloyal to Fordham, which was
one of the reasons why, when I had written it, I sent it to Max and said,
‘Max, being Michael’s son, what do you make of this?’ And he said that
he recognized what I was saying. And when I gave the paper, he came
and sat in the front row and listened to it and I felt very appreciative of
his support because, as you rightly say, I was going into uncharted
territory because it would have been, as I said in the paper, something that
normally I would have discussed with Fordham himself because I was
making a construct about his relationship to his father and the way that
that occluded an area of his professional practice.
WC : But I think it also reads in a way as a tribute to Fordham and what you
learned from Fordham because I thought you proceeded in the way
you’ve described Fordham proceeding himself—with an open mind
and rigorous attitude of discovery and prepared to go where your
discoveries took you.
JA : Well it’s nice of you to say that. That is how Fordham behaved, yes. So
if that’s how it came across then I have learned a lot from him and it
does show in that paper. But K. is an exceptional case, an exceptional
instance of a particular relationship. And it’s not really an analytic
recommendation for working out of the self although it is all coming
out of the self, which is what I think you notice with analysts as they
become more experienced and more senior. They talk more about
working out of themselves. And certainly Fordham’s last papers, which
are more about working out of himself, nearly all the clinical material
is material from K. So there was something about K. that he brought to
this as well, which one has to take into consideration. He was a very
unusual, able, interesting person who was in a lot of pain. And that’s
what we were able to work with.
WC : And I think he was also influential in your thinking about words and
language which you wrote about in the ‘Self invented personality’ paper.
692 James Astor and Warren Colman

JA : Yes, that came out of thinking about the work I was doing with K. and it
came out of reading Tobias Wolff’s different accounts of the same
experience. It led me to think about how we write papers and how we find
our own voice. I had two responses to that paper. One came from Fred
Plaut who said he hadn’t realized that we were no longer the country of
free speech. This referred to the section of that paper about how
transparency really isn’t transparency. It’s often the abdication of
individual responsibility. And the other one was from Tobias Wolff
himself. I don’t know him. I sent him a copy of the paper with some
trepidation. I hadn’t actually cleared the copyright issues with him so I sent
it to him to see whether this was an issue. And he sent me back just a short
email saying that that wasn’t a problem at all. But that he was very pleased
to receive this paper because it’s what every writer hoped for, which was to
be taken seriously by serious people. That was a nice thing to hear.
WC : I want to ask you now where you would position your own work and the
work of the ‘Fordham School’ (or whatever one would call it) as an
approach to analysis in relation both to psychoanalysis on the one hand
and other Jungian approaches on the other. Where do you see yourself
positioned?
JA : I’m not sure I think like that. I think we’ve been ploughing our own furrow
following the clinical work, making links, particularly the links to Bion and
to some aspects of Klein. I only really notice our differences in an international
setting where you do encounter people who are surprised that there can be
links. And I feel then as if I have stepped into a historical time warp. I can
encounter that here as well. For instance, Elizabeth Spillius whom I know
and respect very much and with whom I have discussed cases over the years.
Some years ago I sent her a note saying that one of her papers was very Jungian
in its formulation of the opposites, the way she had used a particular sentence,
and I said ‘I’m surprised you didn’t put quotation marks around it’. And
she sent me back a friendly postcard saying that she would have done if she
had known it was Jung. She was of that generation that didn’t read Jung,
probably for political reasons. In the same way, at the Institute they tried to
keep Meltzer out of the training when he had a spat with them about training
analysis. He was taken off the curriculum. I think he’s got back in again now.
There is what you’re allowed to think and what you’re not allowed to
think. And there’s still a bit of that that goes on. But I don’t think of our
work as having a particular place in the context of the wider world. I see
our work much more in the context of what we’ve developed here.
WC : When you say you plough your own furrow, it reminds me of what you
were saying earlier about the way Fordham approached clinical work and
The JAP Interview 693

the way you approach clinical work. That’s your focus and you draw in
what seems relevant and helpful to helping you understand your own work.
JA : Yes, that’s exactly right.
WC : Do you still go back and read Jung? And do you read other Jungian
writers from abroad?
JA : Not any more, not since I’ve closed my clinical practice, no. The writer I
haven’t read a lot of—and I think this is historically quite interesting in
the SAP—we were never taught and we never read Hillman. And I think
Hillman is an interesting Jungian for all sorts of reasons. And I’m sorry
that he wasn’t included in our curriculum. And I haven’t found time for
it myself. I think now I would go back and read some of the things he’s
written. I think it’s quite helpful particularly if you’re interested in writing
as well because he’s interesting about imagination.
WC : Where do you think we are now, both as a Society and in the context of
the difficulties analysis is facing now?
JA : Well, I think we are struggling to recognize that having very high barriers
to entry and driving away people who are interested but not yet qualified
to become analysts is foolish. But the problem that we’re having is that, if
you take a pragmatic point of view, you find yourself disappointed at
being thought to be unprincipled and not respectful of the intensive
training. And it seems to be quite a struggle at the moment for people to
accept that you can be in favour of a more pragmatic approach and one
which gradually introduces people and yet, at the same time, maintain
the standards of our intensive work. It was certainly my experience. I didn’t
bounce on to the analyst’s couch five times a week and think whoopee here
we go, this is just what I want. I put my toe in the water and thought this is rather
an odd way of thinking about things. I’m not sure how comfortable this is
and I’d come and go, come and go and I had a particularly skilful analyst
who managed that very well until I did become quite fascinated by it and
engaged in the process. I don’t see why we can’t, as an Institute, use that sort
of experience, which is common to many people of being interested, being a
bit anxious, being a bit threatened, being a bit fascinated, combine it with
teaching, combine it with reading and gradually introduce people to this world.
That’s the way I see ourselves developing. I don’t know whether that point of
view will prevail.
WC : Are you concerned about the future of analytic work?
JA : I think there are so many things on offer now but there will always be a place
for this. The knowledge and the understanding that analysts bring will
continue to be valuable and sought after. Whether these intensive trainings will
survive in an economic climate which doesn’t support them remains to be seen.
694 James Astor and Warren Colman

WC : We’ve been talking about the future of the analytic world generally. But I
want to come back to Michael Fordham and your view about his legacy
and the way he is seen now in the Jungian world.
JA : I think his legacy is massive. His work on the self and childhood, on
deintegration and reintegration will go on. That will endure. As will his clinical
discoveries and editorial work. I think his legacy is very powerful, and
important, which is why I’ve stepped in from time to time when I’ve
encountered stories being published about him or statements made about
him that I feel to be quite unlike the person I knew and quite untrue, too.
WC : For example?
JA : For example, in Kirsch’s book on The Jungians he makes a construct about
the SAP going in the direction that it did because Fordham felt rejected by
Jung so he turned towards the psychoanalysts and [Kirsch] constructs a
sort of fantasy about Fordham being on the outside, because Jung referred
Fordham to Baynes and did not take him on himself. Well, if you read the
correspondence between Jung and Fordham, it couldn’t be further from
the truth. This construction is not evidentially supported. So I wrote a
review of Kirsch’s book saying that and pointing out many other errors.
I think that there have also been other rather rash statements made about
Fordham. John Beebe said in public that he thought Fordham was homo-
phobic. And to my astonishment the SAP put that on its website. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Historically it is true he had supported a
psychoanalytic view of homosexuality for a number of years, a view
which has now been revised, but he was not at all homophobic. I spoke
to Michael’s son, Max, and said ‘do you recognize this statement? Was
your father somebody with an irrational prejudice, a fear of homosexuality
and homosexuals?’ He said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Couldn’t be less like my father who was tolerant in all respects of people’s
sexuality and didn’t regard it as anything to do with him if my friends were
homosexual and came to the house, it wasn’t a matter to be discussed’. And
that’s certainly the man I knew. So when I hear things like that it makes me
angry. And it also makes me angry that the SAP chose to broadcast it
because it gives a misleading impression of him and the SAP.
I think, though, when you talk about the legacy and the SAP, we do
have to decide whether we are a horticultural organization or a warehousing
one—whether we’re an organization that’s going to grow and develop and
have ideas of our own or whether we’re going to be an organization that
stores in the warehouse of our organization all this knowledge from our
founders. Because that makes us rather a dependent organization.
Whereas if we could be more forward looking and allow the creativity
of the next generations to come forward, I think our development would
be much better.
The JAP Interview 695

WC : So we need to change really.

JA : We do. But we need people who have got the energy to do that, which is
not just the young people, we need some of the older people to do it as
well, or the people who know the Society.
WC : And what about your own future, because you’ve retired from clinical
practice now?
JA : That was a family choice. Having spent 30 or more years doing analytic
work, I got to a point where I have grandchildren, three not in this country
and two out of London. We have a measure of economic independence.
We have a little house in France. We have a full and varied life. Did I want
to be restricted by the practice—although there are many, many valuable
things in the discipline of regular work like this—or did I want to be freer
for the last … let’s say 10 or 15 more years to go? And that was a choice
Jane and I talked over. Weaning myself from my practice was very, very
difficult and it’s very strange if you have been used to being in your
consulting room from half past seven in the morning to half past seven at
night day in, day out, not to have this. I had started to change that because
from 1999 onwards I was doing psychoanalytic organizational consultancy
and teaching organizational consultancy at the Tavistock. But it certainly
was difficult to stop, which I did slowly over a period of two years. But
now that it’s done, I feel quite relieved and I have many, many interests. And
what I find I’ve replaced it with is the pleasurable preoccupation of a particular
focus of study. At the moment it’s a period of American history around the time
of the late 18th century when the most extraordinary things were going on in
America. And I’ve got a particular angle I’m looking at that from. At the
moment I’m absorbed in the biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
and their different attitudes to government and society and finding that
completely fascinating. And that’s how I’m spending my time.

It’s not like clinical work but it’s disciplined in its focus particularly if you’re
trying to write about it. They had such different views of society and what makes
the world go around. Can you give primacy to the individual and how do you
have checks and balances in society? You see it now in the world in which we live.
It’s the rights of the few and the many and how they interact and what privileges
you allow the few in relation to the many. That discussion goes on and on. You
saw it in the last election, the Obama election, the Republicans taking a very
strange point of view, to my mind anyway.

WC : Well, we’re coming to the end and what I quite often say at the end of
initial clinical interviews, and I’m too much of a clinician not to say it
now, is ‘Was there anything else you’d like to say?
696 James Astor and Warren Colman

JA : No, I don’t think so. I think I’ve said what I wanted to say about Michael
and other people. I haven’t mentioned some of the other supervisors
and people who helped me. Ron Britton has been a very important
person in my professional life. He was my supervisor for a number of
years and I learned a great deal from him and appreciated that very much.
But no, I think I’ve said what I wanted to say. Thank you for giving me
the opportunity.
WC : Thank you very much.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Dans cette interview, James Astor parle à Warren Colman de son évolution comme
analyste jungien depuis sa propre expérience de l’analyse personnelle dans les années
1960 jusqu’à sa retraite récente de la pratique clinique. La discussion englobe sa longue
association avec Michael Fordham, la formation à l’analyse d’enfants à la SAP, les
séminaires d’observation de l’enfant avec Fordham et Gianna Henry, grâce auxquels
Fordham put faire de nouvelles découvertes sur le développement de l’enfant, son
expérience de supervision avec Donald Meltzer, ainsi que le développement de sa pensée
propre tout au long d’une série d’articles sur le processus analytique, la supervision, et la
relation entre langage et vérité. L’interview se termine avec des réflexions sur le legs de
Michael Fordham et l’avenir du travail analytique.

In diesem von Warren Colman mit James Astor geführten Interview spricht jener über
seine Entwicklung zum Jungianischen Analytiker aus der Erfahrung seiner
persönlichen Analyse in den 1960-gern bis zu seinem kürzlich angetretenen Rückzug
aus der klinischen Tätigkeit heraus. Das Gespräch tangiert seine langjährige
Verbindung mit Michael Fordham, die Ausbildung in Kinderanalyse bei der SAP, die
Säuglingsbeobachtungsseminare mit Fordham und Gianna Henry durch die Fordham
in die Lage kam, neue Entdeckungen bezüglich der Säuglingsentwicklung zu machen,
seine Supervisionserfahrungen mit Donald Meltzer und die Entwicklung seines eigenen
Denkens durch eine Serie von Abhandlungen über den analytischen Prozeß,
Supervision und die Beziehung von Sprache und Wahrheit. Das Interview schließt
mit Betrachtungen über das Erbe Michael Fordhams und die Zukunft der analytischen
Arbeit.

In questa intervista con Warren Colman James Astor racconta della sua evoluzione in
quanto analista junghiano a partire dalla sua propria esperienza di analisi personale negli
anni sessanta fino al suo recente ritiro dalla pratica clinica. La discussione riguarda la sua
lunga associazione con Michael Fordham, la formazione analitica infantile alla SAP, i
seminari di osservazione infantile con Fordham e Gianna Henry mediante i quali
Fordham fu in grado di fare nuove scoperte riguardanti lo sviluppo infantile, la sua
esperienza di supervisione con Donald Meltzer e lo svilupparsi di un suo proprio
pensiero attraverso una serie di lavori riguardanti il processo analitico, la supervisione
The JAP Interview 697

e la relazione tra linguaggio e verità. L’intervista si conclude con delle riflessioni

sull’eredità di Michael Fordham e il futuro del lavoro analitico.

В этом интервью с Уорреном Колманом Джеймс Астор говорит о своем пути

юнгианского аналитика, начиная с собственного опыта индивидуального анализа в
1960-е, до своего недавнего ухода на пенсию и завершения клинической практики.
Беседа касается его долгого общения с Майклом Фордхэмом, тренинга детского анализа
в Обществе Аналитической Психологии, семинаров по наблюдению за младенцами с
Майклом Фордхэмом и Джианной Хенри – семинаров, в ходе которых Майкл Фордхэм
смог сделать новые открытия о развитии младенцев; Астор рассказывает о своем опыте
супервизий с Дональдом Мельтцером и о развитии своих собственных идей,
результатом которого стал ряд статей, посвященных аналитическому процессу,
супервизиям и отношениям между языком и истиной. Интервью завершается мыслями
о наследии Майкла Фордхэма и о будущем аналитической работы.

En esta entrevista con Warren Colman, James Astor nos habla de su desarrollo como
analista Junguiano desde su experiencia de análisis personal en 1960 hasta su reciente
jubilación de la práctica clínica. El análisis abarca su larga asociación con Michael
Fordham, su formación analítica con niños en el SAP, las participaciones en los
seminarios sobre bebes con Fordham y Gianna Henry, a través de los cuales Fordham
pudo hacer nuevos descubrimientos sobre desarrollo infantil, su experiencia de supervisión
con Donald Meltzer y el desarrollo de su propio pensamiento a través de una serie de
documentos sobre el proceso analítico, el control y la relación entre el lenguaje y la verdad.
La entrevista concluye con reflexiones sobre el legado de Michael Fordham y el futuro de la
labor analítica.

References
Astor, J. (1995). Michael Fordham: Innovations in Analytical Psychology. London and
New York: Routledge.
Davies, M. & Sidoli, M. (eds.) (1988). Jungian Child Psychotherapy: Individuation in
Childhood. London: Karnac Books.
Fordham, M. (1985). ‘Abandonment in infancy’. Chiron, 2, 1.
Williams, M. (1963). ‘The indivisibility of the personal and collective unconscious’.
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 8, 1, 45–50.