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.
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.
[6] 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.
[6] In the 1970s he would also finally establish a separate Jungian training for analysts wishing to specialise in work with children and adolescents.
[8][9] 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.
[12] Throughout the next decades he ran a private analytic practice and had a role in the Tavistock Clinic teaching trainees involved in baby observations.
With his wife he played a pivotal role in training the next generation of Jungian analysts and making major theoretical contributions.
[13] 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.
This nuance was expressed in Fordham's text on the occasion of Jung's death in 1961:[15] After the death in 1988 of his second wife, Frieda (Hoyle, née Rothwell), Fordham moved to a Quaker community in Chalfont St Peter Buckinghamshire, where he continued a small practice, welcomed visitors and followed cricket.
The primary self, taken as the original totality of each person, with its 'archetypal' tendencies to develop aspects, such as language, etc., enters into relation with the external world through a dual process of de-integration and re-integration.
It is also the time when pathways are established for the future formation of complexes, when reactions to certain stimuli remain trapped in the unconscious.