Georg Groddeck’s Maternal Turn: Its Evolution and Influence on Early Psychoanalysts

The paper examines the biographical, cultural and clinical influences on the “maternal turn” of Georg Groddeck, a German physician and correspondent of Sigmund Freud. It demonstrates Groddeck’s influence on Sándor Ferenczi, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Karen Horney, each of whom influenced generations of psychoanalysts. The authors explore the resonance of Groddeck’s work with several concepts of contemporary psychoanalysis and raise the question as to whether the roots of these psychoanalytic concepts were seeded by Groddeck’s “maternal turn”, passed on by the above psychoanalysts through intergenerational psychoanalytic training and further elaborated by later investigators who were not necessarily familiar with the work of Groddeck.     

Sándor Ferenczi und der Institutionskonflikt der Psychoanalyse

By the foundation of the International Psychoanalytical Association by Freud, Jung and Ferenczi the “psychoanalytic movement” joined into regulated tracks. Thus, the project “Psychoanalysis”, a project in the spirit of the “Aufklärung”, which had prescribed itself to individualistic autonomy, got into breach. In this contribution the reasons are reflected in regard to the establishment as non-university science and the threat of marginalization. They objected Freud’s pretension of influence and belonging. It is unclear why it was explicitly Sándor Ferenczi who was designated to be the precursor of that foundation. He was initially a critical opponent of Freud’s thoughts. His biography illustrates that the institutionalization of psychoanalysis happened too early and that this brought scientific isolation and personal distress over his life when, at the end of his life, he strived for emanzipation in his relationship to Freud.     

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.     

Why ‘spiritism’?

Some of the early representatives of psychoanalysis had a lifelong interest in certain ‘occult’ phenomena. Although several theories were born for the purpose of understanding the interest of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung or Sándor Ferenczi in spiritualism and related phenomena, interpreters usually ignore the changing cultural meaning and significance of modern occult practices like spiritualism. The aim of the present essay is to outline the cultural and historical aspects of spiritualism and spiritism in Hungary, and thus to shed new light on the involvement of Ferenczi – and other Hungarian psychoanalysts like Géza Róheim, István Hollós, and Mihály Bálint – in spiritualism and spiritism. The connections between spiritualism and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis will be discussed, highlighting the cultural and scientific significance of Hungarian spiritualism and spiritism in the evolution of psychoanalysis. Taking into account the relative lack of the scientific research in the field of spiritism in Hungary, it can be pointed out that Ferenczi undertook a pioneering role in Hungarian psychical research.     

Fleeing from one place,searching for another

The history of psychoanalysis also tells the story of how individuals were uprooted. Oppression and persecution forced Jewish psychoanalysts into exile during the interwar period and the Second World War. An account of the history of psychoanalysis in a particular country is also bound to mirror international conditions. This article tells the life story of a psychoanalyst of Jewish descent. However, it also tells another story, namely the painful history of psychoanalysis. The life of the Jewish psychoanalyst, Lajos Székely (1904-1995), who found his way to Sweden in May 1944, summarises and distils the destiny of other Jewish psychoanalysts. The article describes the life of a psychoanalyst, but is at the same time about what he represents in a more general sense. It is about the many Jewish psychoanalysts who were forced to flee and who, although the flight was finally over, still uprooted, were compelled to seek a place and a purpose in a new social environment.     

DARWIN AND CHRISTIANITY: TRUTH AND MYTH

In recent years many historical myths about the relations between science and religion have been corrected but not always with sensitivity to different types and functions of “myth.” Correcting caricatures of Darwin's religious views and of the religious reaction to his theory have featured prominently in this myth‐busting. With the appearance in 2017 of A. N. Wilson's depiction of Darwin himself as a “mythmaker,” it is appropriate to reconsider where the myths lie in discourse concerning Darwin and Christianity. Problems with Wilson's account are identified and his provocative demeaning of Darwin is contrasted with an image gleaned from Darwin's friend and colleague George Romanes. The article concludes with a brief reference to the problem of suffering and to the work of Christopher Southgate.     

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.     

THE BLOOD CRISIS: <Emphasis Type="Italic">A CHOICE BETWEEN DYING AND REARRANGING?</Emphasis>

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.     

“Coming from Afar” and “Temporarily Becoming the Patient Without Knowing it”: Two Necessary Analytic Conditions According to Ferenczi’s Later Thought

In this paper the author discusses two points regarding Ferenczi’s views of psychoanalysis. The first concerns the fact that analysts, like their patients, “come from afar” (a concept of Borgogno, 2011). The second, closely linked to the first, has to do with Ferenczi’s belief that psychoanalytical knowledge is not intellectual but visceral, seeing that if analysts are to truly understand their patients they must first “take on” their suffering in such a way as to “become the patient.” The author follows Ferenczi’s progression along these two points through his whole oeuvre, from his first psychoanalytical writings to the Clinical Diary (1932a) of the last year of his life.     

“Ablation of the Parental Images”: A Secret Core in Charles Rycroft’s Psychoanalytic Thought

This article arises from the need to “present” (that is, to read again in a “present and actual” light) the paper, “Why Analysts Need Their Patients' Transferences” by Charles Rycroft (which first appeared in 1993 and is re-published in this Special Issue), and is therefore strictly connected to the ideas the latter contains. The authors, on the one hand, outline the stages of the journey that took Rycroft to elaborate the concept of “ablation of the parental images”, and on the other, retrace his personal “analytic genealogy” and discover a “missing forefather”, Sándor Ferenczi, who has represented for a long time a direct “missing link” in the history of psychoanalysis.     

The Freud–Ferenczi controversy in light of Emma Eckstein's circumcisio

Abstract

Emma Eckstein's circumcision trauma has been powerfully suppressed, denied, and dissociated from the history of the origins of psychoanalysis. Even though Freud did not categorize it as a trauma, he was deeply impacted by it in the period when he provided psychoanalysis with his foundation. Despite Freud's intellectual erasure of the trauma that Emma experienced, her “cut” never ceased to unconsciously break through Freud's fantasies and discourse, haunting the psychoanalytic building as a veritable ghost. Sándor Ferenczi became the recipient of what Freud could not consider in his own mind, and his revision of the “Bausteine” (building blocks) of psychoanalysis featured an attempt to heal the split embedded in the foundation of psychoanalysis.     

Culture,Influence, and the “I-ness” of Me: Commentary on Papers by Susan Bodnar,Gary B. Walls,and Steven Botticelli

The undeniable realities of globalization at the dawn of the 21st century have brought the United States and its citizens to the startling realization that we must grapple politically, economically, and culturally with the wide range of diversity existing within and without our borders. As greater numbers of culturally diverse persons are now represented in their caseloads, psychoanalysts are also forced to examine the relevance of psychoanalytic theories and practice in meeting their needs. The author discusses three papers that propose overlapping and differing opinions as to the function of psychoanalysis in the lives of culturally diverse patients, and its capacity to influence more public, social and political change. This paper questions the meaning of the term “culture.” It attempts to tease apart the nature of memory and dissociation among those who suffer intergenerational trauma because of their membership in particular cultural or ethnic groups. Also addressed is the extent to which, as described by social constructivist theory, self is entirely a socially constructed phenomenon. The author questions the extent to which, alternatively, “self,” possessed of will, agency and authority, exists in a mutually influencing relationship with the social world.     

THWARTING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DETECTIVES: DEFENDING THE SEVERN LEGACY

In 1993, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi (Aron & Harris) was published. This groundbreaking volume contained the chapter, The Case of “RN”: Sandor Ferenczi’s Radical Experiment in Psychoanalysis (Fortune, 1993), which told the story of “RN”—Ferenczi’s code-name in his Clinical Diary for his critically important patient, Elizabeth Severn. The chapter presented biographical details and original research supporting the rich clinical material revealed in Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary. Now, two decades later, RN has continued to affirm her place as one of the most important patients in the history of psychoanalysis. On this twentieth anniversary, just past, of the recognition of her story, I would like to reflect back and recount the beginnings of my “detective” work on the Case of RN, particularly my encounter with Severn’s daughter, Margaret.     

Legitimizing the “War on Terror”: Political Myth in Official‐Level Rhetoric

This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007 ) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official‐level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the “War on Terror.” Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the “War on Terror.”     

The Radical Cure: Commentary on Paper by Eyal Rozmarin

This commentary on Eyal Rozmarin's paper “To Be Is to Betray” considers the place of history in the psychoanalytic encounter. Examining texts by Adorno and Ferenczi, the author cautions against “radical cures” that conflate political values with analytic ones.     

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 Psychic Life of Fragments: Splitting from Ferenczi to Klein*

The present paper starts from the reflection that there is a curious “phenomenological gap” in psychoanalysis when it comes to processes of splitting and to describing the “life” of psychic fragments resulting from processes of splitting. In simpler terms, we are often in a position to lack a precise understanding of what is being split and how the splitting occurs. I argue that although Melanie Klein’s work is often engaged when talking of splitting (particularly through discussions on identification, projection and projective identification), there are some important phenomenological opacities in her construction. I show that by orchestrating a dialogue between Melanie Klein and Sándor Ferenczi, we arrive at a fuller and more substantive conception of psychic splitting and of the psychic life of fragments which are the result of splitting. This is even more meaningful because there are some unacknowledged genealogical connections between Ferenczian concepts and Kleinian concepts, which I here explore. While with Klein we remain in the domain of “good” and “bad” objects—polarised objects which are constantly split and projected—with Ferenczi we are able to also give an account of complicated forms of imitation producing psychic fragments and with a “dark” side of identification, which he calls “identification with the aggressor”. While attempting to take steps toward imagining a dialogue between Klein and Ferenczi, I note a certain silent “Ferenczian turn” in a late text by Melanie Klein, “On the Development of Mental Functioning”, written in 1958. In particular, I reflect on her reference to some “terrifying figures” of the psyche, which cannot be accounted for simply as the persecutory parts of the super-ego but are instead more adequately read as more enigmatic and more primitive psychic fragments, resulting from processes of splitting.     

Sollen Psychoanalytiker Psychotherapeuten ausbilden?

With respect to the radical changes in psychotherapeutic education as a consequence of the Law for Psychotherapy that has been put into force, the author elaborates on political, medical and strategic aspects. It is of special interest whether psychoanalysts having had the “monopoly” of training in depth psychological therapy should further take responsibility for the training in and the development of this method. Meanwhile, other therapeutic schools are claiming depth psychological psychotherapy for themselves and they deny the essential role of psychoanalysis as a foundation of it. In addition, the psychoanalytic institutes themselves do not agree on this issue. A further aspect of the question is that of marketing strategies: in order to survive, it is for psychoanalytic institutes at a time of lessening interest in standard psychoanalytic training important to offer training in depth psychological therapy with its comparatively less expensive and less extensive curriculum. But the essential question remains: should psychoanalysts train psychotherapists and take responsibility for an independent depth psychological therapy, or not? The author calls for a separate profound education in depth psychology taught by psychoanalysts in order to maintain a positive atmosphere for psychoanalysis e.g. in clinical institutions. He agrees with the IPV that this would help to solve “the crisis of the psycho analysis”. Finally, some of the most important, unsolved questions referring to a separate and profound education in depth psychology are presented and possible solutions are offered. It is of crucial importance to take up again the discussion within the psychoanalytical associations and to adjust their medical as well as political attitude to the new ways depth psychology is taught at psychoanalytical institutes.