The Psychoanalytic Conception of Trauma in Ferenczi and the Question of Temporality

A reciprocal and ongoing interaction about theory and clinical technique developed between Freud and Ferenczi in the years from 1908 to 1933. During the course of this ongoing dialogue, the concept of psychic trauma gradually transformed. Ferenczi continued to elaborate on this issue, and concluded with his work on the interaction of trauma and fantasy. Ferenczi initially refuted Freud's early trauma theses and finally conceptualized a metapsychological reformulation of trauma, an inverse development to Freud's formulations. Ferenczi highlighted two essential concepts in the theory and technique of trauma: the processes of identification and the splitting of the ego, while he stressed the enormous role of disavowal in the dynamics of trauma. The author hopes to demonstrate how Ferenczi's contributions added to developments of the concepts of disavowal and temporality, to the recovery of traumatic memory and the modification of the classical concept of interpretations.     

Contributors

Abstract

This paper studies the interaction of the clinical theories of two major British theorists, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Through three clinical examples, we see how the “Klein-Winnicott dialectic” operates in a significantly developmental fashion to advance and fulfill clinical work. Winnicott’s “object survival” is looked at in developmental conjunction with Klein’s “mourning” as a primary clinical and developmental process. This interaction also captures the essence of working with the aggression of a self that has been traumatically disrupted within its early development. This paper demonstrates how such work leads to the assimilation and grieving of primal object loss, evolving into a “developmental mourning process.” This developmental mourning includes the working-through of an “abandonment depression” in the character-disordered patient. A clinical example in a 1989 essay on “psychic pain” by Betty Joseph is used to set up the clinical challenge of going beyond the symptomatic clinging behavior of developmental arrest, into full psychic birth as a separate other, an Other who can relate to an Other. Conclusively, the subjective visceral affect noted and monitored in its clinical dimensions here is that of human “heartache,” which can also include regret.     

The Failure of Clara Thompson’s Ferenczian (Proxy) Analysis of Harry Stack Sullivan*

After hearing Ferenczi’s talks on theory and practice in New York in 1926, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan urged his friend and colleague Clara Thompson to get analyzed by Ferenczi so they could learn his technique. After saving for 2 years Thompson was a patient of Ferenczi for three summers and then moved to Budapest full-time for analysis until Ferenczi’s death. Two years after she returned to New York she attempted to analyze Sullivan. Analysis was broken off in anger by Sullivan after 14 months. Before the promised Ferenczian analysis began Thompson discovered Wilhelm Reich’s Character Analysis (1933) and she tried an aggressive attack on character with Sullivan rather than Ferenczian trauma-oriented “relaxation” and “neocathartic” therapy. Sullivan could not tolerate this. Because of their own unhealed trauma both individually and in relation to each other, neither Thompson nor Sullivan was able to advance Ferenczi’s views on trauma or its healing in America.     

“PRIMORDIAL CHANT”. SÁNDOR FERENCZI AS AN ORPHIC POET*

Ferenczi’s deviations from Freudian thinking have caused enormous controversy. This paper re-examines Ferenczi’s theoretical and technical innovations through the lens of Orpha—one of his most characteristic and valuable contributions, the culmination point of his thought, and the leitmotif of his work. So far research on Ferenczi’s Orpha concept has been relatively sparse and there is still much obscurity about this term that he adopted from or co-created with his “evil genius” Elizabeth Severn. The following paper will attempt to shed more light on the origin, evolution, functions, and the philosophical foundations of the Orpha concept. Along with the theoretical, therapeutic and philosophical aspects, this point of view will enable a better understanding of the poetic value and the lyricism of Ferenczi’s work. Orphic harmony—the fusion of Dionysian ecstasy and Apollonian clarity into the “principal instinct of tranquility” proclaimed by Ferenczi in 1930 and into the “primordial chant of cosmic unity” (Herder), emerges as the essence of the Ferenczian work and worldview.

     

Ferenczi and Winnicott: Searching for a “Missing Link” (of the Soul)

The aim of this paper is to present the close link between Ferenczi's and Winnicott's theoretical, clinical and therapeutic thought, indicating how this link has become something of a “missing link” in the history of psychoanalytic ideas, an implication which we retain, in part, to this day. In the first part entitled “Who's speaking to whom?”, I aim to explore the contents of the most essential parts of their messages, stressing the similarities and differences between them, and citing the most important authors whom they address (Freud for Ferenczi, Klein for Winnicott). In the second part, I aim to tackle the general direction underlying both their work and their lives, concentrating specifically on “the maternal”, and examining the repercussions of this aspect on psychoanalytic technique and practice. In the third part, as a kind of “Parting”, I will present further brief conclusions on the relevance and significance of their thoughts in modern day psychoanalysis, defining Ferenczi and Winnicott as “founders of future discursiveness”.     

THE CHILD AS A TRAUMATIC SELF-COMPONENT IN FERENCZI’S LATER PSYCHOANALYSIS

In the Ferenczi renaissance of the last few decades it has become more and more important to elaborate and reconstruct the general shape, the “Weltanschauung”, of his psychoanalysis. The construct of his “psychoanalytic anthropology” is based on the relational nature of individual existence. Relationality pervades the life narrative through the concept and role of the trauma and is crucial to the understanding of Ferenczi’s self-concept. He understood the human individual as essentially fragmented in a “preprimal” way, in which the split self contains the child, as an active, always present infantile component. Through powerful allegories like the “Orpha” or the “wise baby,” Ferenczi suggested an essentially post-modern idea of self that can be connected and differentiated from Winnicott’s True and False Self.     

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.     

KLEIN,FERENCZI AND THE CLINICAL DIARY

The aim of this article is to revisit Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary (1932) to investigate the influence he had on Melanie Klein’s work. It starts from the position that insufficient recognition has been given to Ferenczi’s contribution to Klein’s body of work and her professional development. Her analysis with Ferenczi lasted 5 years, a relatively long analysis for the period. It explores his influence in three specific areas: the importance of raw and early emotion in the maternal bond, the importance of freedom and authenticity in the analytic relationship, and finally the use of transference and countertransference feelings. Ferenczi’s ill-fated experiment with mutual analysis will be discussed as it opened up a route to explore the analytic relationship, with important consequences for the future development of psychoanalysis.     

Klein and Lacan Meet 21st Century Schizoid Man: Fairy Stories for the Modern Era

Melanie Klein invited us into the phenomenology of the schizoid dilemma through her depictions of the paranoid?schizoid position. By inserting his recursive arrows, Bion extended this conceptualization, showing us the folly of believing that we can ever entirely move beyond the frightening fantasies and realities of social exclusion and isolation. The 21st century has brought, along with the explosion of technology, an expulsion from the social order of many children who have found refuge from isolation and humiliation in the more accessible and less terrifying world of media and technological invention. What may look like narcissism can mask a terrible underlying schizoid failure to enter into the human race. This is the realm of fantasy run amok, where desire becomes alien and alienated such that one is haunted and hunted down by its very possibility. In this universe, conceptualizations from Klein, Bion, and Lacan help us to locate the individual who has become caught in a massive psychic retreat such that there is no subject because there are no objects. To illustrate, I describe my work with a young man who is living in a terrible “zombie zone” where people are not real and therefore are incomprehensible and terribly dangerous. The poignancy of his dilemma is heartbreaking. Perhaps that is one lesson we can still take from our old fairy tales: when one’s heart can be broken by another’s plight, then comes the possibility of a healing, an entry through that piercing of what had been impenetrable.     

Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation

In this paper I propose the phrase “living in an airless world” to characterize the intrapsychic situation when a child has grown up in circumstances of extreme parental negation (non-recognition). Of the two major dynamics Ferenczi identified as the sequelae of early trauma—“identification with the aggressor” and “splitting of the personality” (dissociation)—the latter has received far more attention in the relational literature than the former. I seek to correct that imbalance by examining in depth the phenomenon of identification with the other’s response to the self—especially its most toxic form, identification with parental negation. Airless world syndrome involves a kind of identificatory bondage to the internalized negating other which is disabling to the senses of self and personal agency and impairs the capacities to think, feel in an integrated way, separate and grieve. Consequently, for patients living in airless worlds, the central unconscious need and preoccupation is to convert their actual parents into true parents who will finally recognize their subjective experience and needs, thereby allowing them, for the first time, psychically to breathe. This understanding, in turn, has implications for how we think about the analytic field in relation to the patient’s developmental, parent-child field. The therapeutic implications of this model are described and illustrated with three clinical examples.     

Ferenczi and Freud – From psychoanalysis as a “professional and personal home” to the creation of a “psychoanalytic home” for the patient1

Abstract

The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a “professional and personal home” that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar “psychoanalytic home.” As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.     

Commentary on Paper by Philip A. Ringstrom

When we feel overwhelmed by an inescapable threat, we “identify with the aggressor” (Ferenczi, 1933). Hoping to survive, we sense and “become” precisely what the attacker expects of us—in our behavior, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. Identification with the aggressor is closely coordinated with other responses to trauma, including dissociation. Over the long run, it can become habitual and can lead to masochism, chronic hypervigilance, and other personality distortions.

But habitual identification with the aggressor also frequently occurs in people who have not suffered severe trauma, which raises the possibility that certain events not generally considered to constitute trauma are often experienced as traumatic. Following Ferenczi, I suggest that emotional abandonment or isolation, and being subject to a greater power, are such events. In addition, identification with the aggressor is a tactic typical of people in a weak position; as such, it plays an important role in social interaction in general.     

The debate between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein: An historical survey

In this paper I attempt to provide an overview of the professional dialogue between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. I examine relevant theoretical and biographical issues, and reflect on divergencies. My conclusion is that each of them highlighted a different but valuable aspect of children's mental life, and that together their theories laid the foundation for a comprehensive mental health service for children.     

Adorno,Ferenczi, and a new “categorical imperative after Auschwitz”

Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno's mature thought can be characterized by the attempt to articulate what he calls a “new categorical imperative after Auschwitz.” By this, Adorno means that theory and praxis must be organized in such a way that the Holocaust does not repeat itself. This article argues that Sándor Ferenczi’s metapsychology is key to understanding Adorno’s attempt to rethink the nature of precisely such a new categorical imperative. One of the key themes of Adorno’s entire corpus is the problem of the “identification with the aggressor” – an idea that originates with Ferenzci rather than, as is commonly thought, Anna Freud. The Ferenczian dimension of Adorno’s thinking becomes particularly clear in Adorno’s thoughts on the question of freedom. In this context, Adorno engages in a psychoanalytically informed critique of the philosophy of freedom and a speculative philosophical critique of psychoanalysis. The fashioning of a “new categorical imperative” after Auschwitz entails a form of education directed towards a new form of Mündigkeit, one oriented towards contradiction, resistance, and a steadfast refusal to “identify with the aggressor.”     

Something Was Lost in Freud’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</Emphasis>: A Ferenczian Reading*

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) brought a lot of new possibilities to psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of losses. While I recognize the importance of the death drive as a metapsychological construct, I argue that the first thing that went missing with the arrival of this groundbreaking Freudian text is the theorization of the ego instincts or the self-preservative drives. Freud never articulated some plausible inheritors of the ego instincts. I follow the Budapest School, and especially the voice of Sándor Ferenczi, for addressing this loss. The second thing that went missing after Beyond the Pleasure Principle is our openness in thinking through repetition. With the seductive formulation of the “daemonic” repetition in this 1920 text, our theoretical imagination around repetition seems to have been affected. I draw on the work of Sándor Ferenczi for exploring new forms of repetition. Finally, I offer a Ferenczian re-reading of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, which I see as crucial in the process of pluralizing our thinking on repetition.     

“淑女之争”与“君子协议”:回眸英国精神分析学会的“论战”

20世纪40年代,英国精神分析学会内部爆发一场影响全世界精神分析学发展的"战争"。以Anna Freud和Melanie Klein各自为首的精神分析师团体围绕潜意识幻想、本能与力比多以及精神分析培训与教学等一系列主题展开激烈争论,即历史上著名的"Freud-Klein论战"。这场"论战"就精神分析培训问题达成协议,并直接导致克莱因学派、维也纳学派和独立学派三"组"鼎立的英国精神分析时局。"论战"促使了客体关系精神分析与自我心理学的分离,推动了精神分析研究从驱力模式向关系模式的范式转变,奠定了后续精神分析运动发展的格局。     

Analyst Envy in Working With an Artist: Four Scenes

The paper describes a rich analytic relationship with an artist patient in which countertransference feelings of envy surfaced. The analyst's examination of her envy led to a review and reassessment of the concept of envy in psychoanalysis. I propose here that envy is a complex affect that moves on a continuum from a fairly benign combination of admiration and desire to more malignant emotional states, described by Melanie Klein and her followers. Malignant envy may lead to anger, fury, and murderous rage. A more benign form of envy, which emerged for the analyst in the treatment, resulted in psychic support for and validation of the patient as well as a shift in personal identifications and new motivational directions for the analyst.     

Fragmentation,persecution and primitive guilt

The clinical and theoretical approaches of Melanie Klein and her followers provide valuable direction in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients. This paper looks at Klein's work as well as the goals of psychoanalytic work. The clinical issues of primitive guilt and paranoia are discussed with regard to more primitive patients who experience internal fragmentation and psychic chaos. Finally, a case is explored in which a psychotic patient struggled with experiences of primitive guilt and intense persecutory phantasies.     

Epistemology and Psychoanalysis: A Fruitful Relationship

Abstract

Bowlby may be viewed as one of the strongest exponents of the alternative psychoanalytic approach initiated by Ferenczi. His most important contributions are, on a theoretical level, to have potentially placed psychoanalysis onto a firm evolutionary basis, and, at a practical level, to have generated an enormous amount of empirical research. The main traits he shares with Ferenczi are independence of mind and the stress on a loving relationship in normal development and on real-life traumatic events in psychopathology. The similarities between them seem to be due to a convergence, or at the most to an indirect influence of Ferenczi, due to Bowlby's associations with Melanie Klein and the British Middle Group. As regards the specific issue of real-life experience, although Bowlby acknowledges Ferenczi's priority, he seems to have arrived at this concept independently.