Friendship, Creativity and Dispute in the Freud-Fliess and Ferenczi-Groddeck Letters

In this paper we examine the different transferential relationships that occurred between two sets of friends: Freud-Fliess and Ferenczi-Groddeck; consider the impact of these variables on their productivity, creativity, and friendship; and review historical literature to analyze how the nature of their bonds shaped very different personal destinies. Freud and Fliess greatly admired each other, and expressed reciprocal support, trust, and idealization but their underlying dispute over the paternity of certain ideas ultimately led to a bitter end. Essentially, their transference can be characterized as paternal-filial. The Ferenczi-Groddeck relationship, on the other hand, shared many of the same traits as the Freud-Fliess pair: a strong friendship, mutual admiration, even idealization, but their bond evolved into a more fraternal transference, which enabled their love, admiration, and respect to develop into a mutually-enriching relationship that endured for their entire lives.

Raised in the world of psychoanalysis: an interview with Judith Dupont

This interview with Dr. Judith Dupont contains her reminiscences and thoughts about two topics of importance for the historiography of psychoanalysis. First, Dr. Dupont recalls her growing up among and meeting with pioneers, such as Vilma Kovács, Alice and Michael Balint, Melanie Klein, Imre Hermann and others. Second, Dr. Dupont reconstructs the chronicle of Ferenczi's manuscripts: how they were entrusted to Michael Balint by Ferenczi's widow, the complex reasons Balint could not publish them for more than 30 years, and finally, how Dr. Dupont succeeded in bringing the Clinical Diary to the public, and thus enriched contemporary psychoanalysis with the presence of Ferenczi after more than 50 years of silence and censorship.

The Freud-Ferenczi dialogue after the formulation of the Second Topic

The author proposes to examine the scientific dialogue established by Freud and Ferenczi between 1920 and 1933 after Freud's formulation of the Second Topic, the Pleasure Principle. It is very informative to explore the closeness of some formulations of Freud with the more important clinical and metapsychological intuitions of Ferenczi. The role of repetition, the value of affects, the second theory of anxiety, the elasticity of the psychoanalytical technique and the problem of traumatism are some of aspects developed in this paper.

"Call Me by Your Name": The Wrong Action: From Ferenczi to Enactment as a Process

It is always hard for psychoanalysis to connect free associations and action. With Freud, action could be interpreted only when it referred to the transference; otherwise, action was a resistance to the possibility of free association. Unlike Freud, Ferenczi recognized the importance of the analyst's acting-out as the patient's unconscious request for experiences of trauma to be mobilized. By presenting a clinical case, the author offers the analyst's error as the mobilization of a traumatic block. The error activates a "Process of enactment," whereas if the error is not considered positively, it is simply a mistake, or the loss of a creative opportunity.

Countertransference Madness: Supervision, Trans∗, and the Sexual

Drawing on Ferenczi's "confusion of tongues" paradigm, the author argues that the internalization of the supervisor's superego has the potential not only to expand the supervisee's ego (introjection), but also to repress their idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity (intropression). To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender patient during which the supervisor-supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic dialectic and a folie à deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. While the initial interpretation of this experience underscored the supervisor's transphobia, the après-coup of writing up the case has revealed more complex thinking. Accordingly, the countertransference madness to which the author succumbed with his supervisor can now be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical scenarios that the patient experienced with his parents.

"A Dress of Fire": Reading Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary

Ferenczi's Clinical Diary reveals an exceptional analyst who honestly and bravely documented radical clinical experiences and theoretical insights about the tragic impacts of trauma. The author follows Ferenczi's thinking from his falling out with Freud and his view of the classical psychoanalyst's objectivity and emotional detachment as triggers of the original trauma, through the use of the countertransference to lay bare trauma, eventually issuing in his radical experiment in mutual analysis. The Diary's fate in the history of psychoanalysis reflects that of its thinking on trauma: Beginning with Ferenczi's decades-long silencing and exclusion from the main psychoanalytic community, together with the silencing of actual trauma, this history evolved into the revival and dissemination of Ferenczi's thinking and the reappraisal of the role of actual trauma.

Trauma, subjectivity and subjectality

Taking a critical stand on contemporary trends in psychoanalysis regarding trauma, the author addresses the problem of psychic trauma mainly in terms of how it affects the patient's status as a subject. After reexamining the notions of subject and subjectivity, the author illustrates the usefulness of the notion of "subjectality," defined as a critical moment of subjectivity, necessary for processing the consequences of trauma. A clinical illustration is provided.

A forgotten review by Sándor Ferenczi: "Otto Gross: Three essays on internal conflict" (1920)

In early 1920, Otto Gross published his last book, Three Essays on Internal Conflict, almost at the same time as "Beyond the pleasure principle", in which Freud revised his drive theory. Gross was one of the most brilliant analysts of the "first generation", but he had spent more than 10 years outside the psychoanalytic movement, and no one showed any interest in his publications except Ferenczi, who immediately wrote a critical review that has never been translated into English. Here we present the first English translation of Ferenczi's review, "Otto Gross. Three essays on internal conflict" (1920), first published in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. In this review, Ferenczi shows a great deal of interest in the new approach proposed by Gross based on the recently discovered "hospitalism syndrome", identifying the "instinct (or drive) for contact" as the origin of infantile sexuality. This review reveals a key moment in the trajectory of Ferenczi's work, when he took a definitive turn towards investigating early relationships and towards a renewed focus on the trauma factor. This illuminates the rest of his psychoanalytic work and formed the foundations for the attachment and relational approach in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis versus adoption: analytic parenthood and parental countertransference

As we know, Sándor Ferenczi compared the analytic and adoptive relationships as the psychoanalyst exercises a parental role to some extent. The author notes that a commonality between the adoptive relationship and the analytic one is that if the parental couple is burdened with painful counter-transferential experiences and feelings that have not been worked through, these can pose a danger for the strength of the newly developing parental relationship. In the analytic situation the analyst’s position implies the risk of conflict with the parental internal objects resulting from the primary introjections, especially if the original environment was abusive or severely neglectful. Similarly, the adoptive family is often burdened with revengeful and competitive aggressiveness of their own introjected parental objects, having as a main task to keep unified the pre-adoptive autobiographical memories that were dissociated and interrupted. In such cases it is very important to give the adoptive parents help so as to cope with their difficult “countertransference,” supporting them to reduce their sense of guilt and unsuitability to nurse their children, especially if the adoptive parents feel guilty because of their own infertility. In this paper the author describes two cases concerning both situations, emphasising the clinical risks and the evolutionary potentialities.

A Primal Environment for a 21st Century's "Naissance". Thoughts on the Language of Tenderness in Ferenczi's Footsteps

In a progressive maternity clinic in Paris, "Les Bluets", the team and the psychoanalyst work to create a supportive atmosphere, so that the newborn infant and the new parents can receive a respectful welcome with a holding environment. The main participants around the newborn are the parents, midwives, and nurses, and the team members share their observations about how to answer the infant's needs, and adjust and satisfy his/her comfort. This meets what Ferenczi describes as tenderness. Specific, detailed feedback is given so the experience of mother-father-baby cooperation can start to take place from the very beginning. In case the baby is left for adoption, he/she is treated with even more attentive caregiving where all the details are very important.

The "Authoritarian Personality" Reconsidered: the Phantom of "Left Fascism"

This article explores the question of "Left fascism," which emerged in relation to discussions around the Student Movement in the German Federal Republic in the crucial decade between 1967-1977. The term was originally coined by Jürgen Habermas in a lecture entitled "The Phantom Revolution and its Children" in which he suggests that the extreme voluntarism of the students could not but be characterized as "Left fascist." Such a characterization becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969 on the relation between theory and praxis. After first sketching Adorno's conception of the "authoritarian personality," with the help of Sándor Ferenczi's concept of the "identification with the aggressor," the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno's changed orientation: that "fascism" or "authoritarianism" maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.

Constructing Intimate Space Through Narration: Ferenczi's Clinical Diary

Psychoanalysis is a narrative activity of a very special kind. One could even say that the method of free association is a subversive activity since its purpose is to cut through layers of previous conditioning in the effort to open new spaces in the psyche. The hypercathexis of neurotic functioning can only be transformed if new, unknown dynamics are able to emerge, and can then be invested by the subject. This process necessitates economic change-investing novel psychic functioning. Aided by personal analytic experience, the psychoanalyst's role is to help initiate and support this subversive activity in the patient by initiating him/her into the method of free association. Difficulties arise when neither the patient, nor the analyst are comfortable with the symbolic and metaphorical dynamics of free association. Reacting to Freud's lack of interest in an emotional analytic process with the patient, Ferenczi considered the analytical space as a mutual frame, to be transformed in and by the intimate psychoanalytical process. The author explores Ferenczi's Clinical Diary as the construction of an intimate space through narration, attempting to discover Ferenczi's techniques in this subversive activity.

Sándor Ferenczi, A Classical and Contemporary Psychoanalyst : (with particular reference to transference and countertransference)

The article intends to show how Ferenczi is a genuine precursor for many of the themes which lie at the center of the current psychoanalytic debate and, for this reason, how he is the classical and the contemporary psychoanalyst par excellence, especially by the way he has progressively understood and learnt to operate with the patients focusing on working-through the mutual feelings engendered by the therapeutic process.

In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on "Mourning and Melancholia" (1915-1918)

This article concentrates on Freud's draft of "Mourning and Melancholia," written in 1915 and published in 1996. After presenting a summary of the main theses of Freud's draft, Abraham's and Ferenczi's reactions to the text are discussed as well as Freud's response to their comments. In addition to reviewing Freud's partial adoption of Ferenczi's introjection and his reluctance towards Abraham's "mouth eroticism and sadism," the article considers the question of whether and to what extent his disciples' interjections-particularly Abraham's approach-made their way into the final version of "Mourning and Melancholia." The article closes by integrating the notion of narcissistic identification, which forms the core of Freud's understanding of depression, and his study of the "preliminary stages of love," written the same year, into a conceptualization of the narcissistic relationship between subject and object. Special attention is paid to the clinical relevance of the difference between narcissistic and libidinal object cathexis, which Freud had introduced.

Political Divide in the Consulting Room

This paper addresses a treatment relationship that tests the analyst's capacity for empathy within an impinging political context. It involves a Ferenczian "relaxation of technique" within the analytic frame, while the analytic couple attempts to negotiate a polarized transference and countertransference. Specifically, within a long-term treatment imbued with positive transference, my patient becomes openly outraged by my insensitive anti-Trump remarks. Increasing confrontations around the expression of political views illuminate our otherness. He complains of psychic ostracism within a liberal cultural context, which tolerates no divergence from mainstream liberal ideas or discourse. I come to embody the oppressive other: the liberal "thought police", "silencing" him for his perspective. Empathic breaches between us take center stage: how I don't see the world as he does, and don't see or hear him.

Ferenczi as social trauma thinker

In the 21st century, the notion of trauma is so commonly used that one can speak of a culture of trauma. Today, a wide variety of people claim victimhood, pointing to their traumas as validation. Fassin and Rechtman denounce the way in which recognition strategies make use of the identity of victim to justify compensation policies and financial reparations. This paper presents Sándor Ferenczi's contributions on trauma, showing how his theory takes into consideration relational and political aspects that were underemphasized by Freud. When Ferenczi is compared to contemporary recognition thinkers (such as Honneth, Fraser and Butler), one can see that what is at stake in his theory is neither identity nor victimization. It is deeper: Ferenczi shows the importance of the vulnerable dimension in all of us, suggesting that recognizing mutual vulnerability is a basis of the sense of connectedness and solidarity with the other.

THE BLOOD CRISIS: A CHOICE BETWEEN DYING AND REARRANGING?

I began my Ferenczi studies in the fall of 1987, a year before the English translation of his Clinical Diary was published. Since then, I have demonstrated in writing, teaching, working, and living that there is scarcely a passage in this "laboratory notebook of psychoanalysis" that fails to illuminate the clinical and the personal. And above all is Ferenczi's late awareness that his personality had been constructed upon false assumptions. This is a reckoning of thirty years' conscious and unconscious usage of Ferenczi's experience to illustrate, to interpret, and to expose the clinical and personal dimensions of my own life lived as "the will of another person." What constitutes, what allows, a choice between dying and rearranging? Now that I am long past Ferenczi's fifty-nine years, I take the risk every day, and I know it.

Sándor Ferenczi's multiple confusions of tongues and their influence on psychoanalytical thinking

Using a poststructuralist model, this article explores the lecture given by Ferenczi and published under the title "Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child-(The Language of Tenderness and Passion)." By initially focusing on the closed structure of the text, the author identifies two types of confusion of tongues that are closely interlinked: the confusion between adults and the child, and that between the analyst and the analysand. By then placing the manuscript within the corpus of Ferenczi, he connects it to the latter's multilingualism and pleads in favour of autobiographical determinants for psychoanalytic conceptualizations. This positioning of the text in its historical framework also enables it to be situated in the context of the metapsychological confusion of tongues between Freud and Ferenczi, and to delimit the influence of Ferenczi's ideas in psychoanalytic posterity.

I Am a Mystery to Myself

Throughout my lifetime I have had a vague sense of my identity. There were no distinct memories or stories from my childhood and adolescence to provide me with the recognition, much less an appreciation, for who I was in the world. It wasn't until I entered psychotherapy that revelations about my family life came into understanding. This was not from any recollecting of actual events but from the indirect observations of families where being engaged with each other had occurred. Through psychoanalysis, reading a variety of psychoanalytic thinkers, and by taking up my own writing I was encouraged to discover myself, even at the cost of the sorrow of never having that encouragement in growing up, the cost that comes with the exploration. Where no childhood home was to be found a new one was to be created instead.

THE "METHOD OF GAME": SÁNDOR FERENCZI AND HIS PATIENT DM./CLARA THOMPSON

The aim of this paper is to study the Thompson-Ferenczi therapeutic relationship. Ferenczi paid increasing attention to the way in which patient's early life experiences were reenacted in the transference countertransference matrix. Ferenczi's (1931) description of how he "entered into a game" with a patient, has come to be known as enactment. Ferenczi exchanged the word "game" with "play" when patients enacted their past traumatic experiences in analysis. These enactments uncovered the unconscious "dialogue of the game" (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 130), and Ferenczi described them in his Clinical Diary (1932) in his work with Thompson. Using the language of her analyst in describing enactment, Thompson referred to Ferenczi's Relaxation Method as his "play technique". During these moments of "play" Thompson argues that the analyst cooperates with the patient in allowing him to relive "childish attachments" in the context of the treatment.

FERENCZI'S EVOLVING CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISIC PATHOLOGY AND ITS BASIS IN TRAUMA

Ferenczi's landmark contributions to understanding and treating psychological trauma are inseparable from his evolving conception of narcissism, though he grasped their interrelationship only gradually. Ultimately, he saw narcissistic disorders as the result of how children cope with abuse or neglect, and their aftermath-they identify and comply with the needs of the aggressor, and later of people more generally, and dissociate their own needs, feelings, and perceptions; and they compensate for their submission and sacrifice of self by regressing to soothing omnipotent fantasies-which, ironically, may facilitate continued submission. Ferenczi's experiments in technique were designed to help patients overcome their defensive retreat to omnipotent fantasies and regain their lost selves. His earliest experiment, active technique, in which he frustrated patients, was a direct attack on their clinging to omnipotent fantasy. But as he came to see such narcissistic personality distortions as a way of coping with the residue of early trauma, his focus shifted to the underlying trauma. His loving and indulgent relaxation technique was intended as an antidote to early emotional neglect. His final experiment, mutual analysis, characterized by the analyst's openness and honesty in examining his own inevitable insincerities, was an attempt to heal the damage from parents' hypocrisy about their mistreatment, which Ferenczi came to see as most destructive to the child.

So, Doctor, Now, What Do I Do?. Am J Psychoanal 2017;77:64-77. [PMID: 28325938 DOI: 10.1057/s11231-016-9080-3]

This paper proposes a discussion about acting on the therapeutic relationship using the notions of playing and the "use of an object" formulated by Winnicott; the formulations of Ferenczi as the concepts of introjection and the "ability to feel with", as well as the concept of cartography from Deleuze and Guattari. It discusses how to manage the meeting with individuals who confront the analyst with sudden questions, gestures and actions. I propose that the management of the acting considers that there is a call for a conversation in which "doing" is in question, and in which the playful dimension of activities without rules is employed as a necessary option.

SÁNDOR FERENCZI: SECRET REBEL AHEAD OF HIS TIME

The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor. Edited by Adrienne Harris and Steven Kuchuck, New York: Routledge, 2015. 300 pp.

Conceptualizing splitting: On the different meanings of splitting and their implications for the understanding of the person and the analytic process

While "splitting" is a familiar concept, its meaning is not as self-evident as is commonly assumed. In different contexts, it refers to different phenomena and is supported by different understandings of psychic dynamics. In this paper, the author presents four different conceptualizations of splitting, which capture the essential aspects of contemporary psychoanalytic discourse on the concept. There is a dissociative kind of splitting, which involves splitting off, in the face of trauma, whole personalities, which to some extent remain accessible to consciousness; there is a disavowal kind of splitting that splits off our awareness of disturbing realities or their meanings in our efforts to avoid the inner restraints imposed by repression; and there are two forms of splitting of the object into good and bad-one focusing on the splitting of representations of the object due to ego weakness and environmental determinants, and the other on the splitting of the mind itself in a primarily destructive act aimed at sparing the good from the destructiveness of our death instinct. All four conceptualizations have their origins in Freud's writing and then are further developed in the work of later analysts. The author argues that understanding the nature of these various conceptualizations of splitting can contribute to analytic theory and practice. It also sheds light on the essential nature of analytic approaches and how they offer different perspectives on the unity and disunity of man's basic nature.