Are Urban and Colman really in opposition over Fordham's model of the self?

Bounded in a nutshell and a king of infinite space: the embodied self and its intentional world

“…When, in a previous paper, I put forward the idea that trees and ants might be selves, some colleagues thought I was using this as a reductio ad absurdum, as if the idea was somehow ridiculous (Colman , p. 358; Astor , p. 397). Far from it.…”

“…These instances would be subject to self‐organizing, possibly homeostatic, principles which in their similarity from person to person, in their architecture if not in their detail, could be characterized as archetypal but not a priori . (Astor , p. 396)…”

Delusional development in child autism at the onset of puberty: vicissitudes of psychic dimensionality between disintegration and development

“…The idea of primary self elaborated by Fordham (1976)– which this author applies, in terms of its dynamics, to the autistic situation – has been interpreted in different ways by various authors (Astor, 2009; Colman, 2008; Urban, 2008, 2009). Such differences are inevitable, given that Fordham’s idea is an elaboration of the concept of self in Jung, a concept that itself was not described in any straightforward way (Jung, 1920, 1944, 1955–56, 1959b).…”

Conjugating the self

“…James Astor has discerned what he considers to be not an actual, but rather an apparent misunderstanding between Warren Colman and myself in our respective papers in the special Journal edition on the self ( Journal of Analytical Psychology , 53, 3, June 2008). The substance of his commentary is that Colman interprets the view of Fordham and myself to be that the primary self has, a priori , ‘a blueprint which sets patterns for development’ (see Astor 2009 in this issue, p. 395). Astor considers that this is a matter of linguistic rather than conceptual differences, and that this is due to the way Fordham and I discuss the concept of the primary self; that is, we describe it in a way that can imply that it has structures and contents a priori , although it is hardly the case that Fordham and I conceive this to be so.…”

“…This is pertinent to Astor's final point; 'So what has gone awry is that Fordham and Urban's theoretical language are at odds with their actual scientific observations. Their language implies an unfolding of something pre-existing is taking place whereas their observations describe an interactive flux' (see Astor 2009 in this issue, p. 398). Fordham and I have tried to illustrate the 'primary self' (the postulate) by giving observations of actions of the self (the early period marked by such actions, such as those of Andrew and Jake), with the result that the actions can be mistaken for the postulate.…”