The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi

From ghost to ancestor

Adrienne Harris, Steven Kuchuck, Adrienne Harris, Steven Kuchuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317590781
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2016 Gradiva Award for Edited Book

The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi, first published in 1993 & edited by Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris, was one of the first books to examine Ferenczi's invaluable contributions to psychoanalysis and his continuing influence on contemporary clinicians and scholars. Building on that pioneering work, The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor brings together leading international Ferenczi scholars to report on previously unavailable data about Ferenczi and his professional descendants.

Many—including Sigmund Freud himself—considered Sándor Ferenczi to be Freud's most gifted patient and protégé. For a large part of his career, Ferenczi was almost as well known, influential, and sought after as a psychoanalyst, teacher and lecturer as Freud himself. Later, irreconcilable differences between Freud, his followers and Ferenzi meant that many of his writings were withheld from translation or otherwise stifled, and he was accused of being mentally ill and shunned. In this book, Harris and Kuchuck explore how newly discovered historical and theoretical material has returned Ferenczi to a place of theoretical legitimacy and prominence. His work continues to influence both psychoanalytic theory and practice, and covers many major contemporary psychoanalytic topics such as process, metapsychology, character structure, trauma, sexuality, and social and progressive aspects of psychoanalytic work.

Among other historical and scholarly contributions, this book demonstrates the direct link between Ferenczi's pioneering work and subsequent psychoanalytic innovations. With rich clinical vignettes, newly unearthed historical data, and contemporary theoretical explorations, it will be of great interest and use to clinicians of all theoretical stripes, as well as scholars and historians.

PART I
The Context

1
FERENCZI IN OUR CONTEMPORARY WORLD¹

Judit Mészáros

Why Ferenczi today? This question formed the title of a special issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis in 2004. This is only one example of the many periodicals, books, and papers published on the legacy of Ferenczi over the last twenty years. By now, Ferenczi’s main theoretical and therapeutic initiatives have been discovered/rediscovered and integrated into the mainstream of the contemporary theoretical and therapeutic knowledge of psychoanalysis, from countertransference as an indispensable contribution to the dynamic of the psychotherapeutic process, to the essential importance of the early object relationship between mother and child, and to his paradigm shift in trauma theory.

What attracts us to Ferenczi? What does he represent that has been bringing clinicians and academics from various scholarly fields together for decades? What is that glue/essence that we find for ourselves in the oeuvre of this man who was both an enfant terrible and a wise baby at the same time, who created the Budapest School, a school with no walls, no director, and no students in a formal sense. He was a man who did not like institutional structures, but nonetheless recognized their inescapable necessity and initiated the establishment of organizations, among them the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) more than a hundred years ago, which continues to operate today. What is it in the conflict-burdened world of the twenty-first century that provides us with points of connection to Ferenczi, a common way of thinking among professionals who live in a variety of cultures and political systems throughout the world?

What is it in Ferenczi’s personality and way of thinking that smoothes the way for contemporaries to connect to psychoanalysis and to Ferenczi now, just as they did in the past? By now, it is thanks to the tireless work of research, publishing, and education on the part of so many colleagues that a real Ferenczi renaissance has come about. The emergence of this renaissance obviously has numerous components, but some of them can most certainly be linked to Ferenczi’s liberalism, the fact that he was not a dogmatic person, his widespread network in Hungarian society at that time, as well as his outstanding presence in the international psychoanalytic movement during his life.

In this chapter, I have collected a number of examples of Ferenczi’s way of thinking and his approach, of his relationship to his contemporaries and to the culture around him, and of his theoretical and therapeutic innovations that have enriched psychoanalysis and influenced our professional generation. These point to a liberal-mindedness, a tolerance, and a spirit of cooperation—whether in scholarship or medicine—that developed through respect for the autonomy of others, including the patient!

An Optimal Mix of Liberalism, Respect, and Interactive Communication

It is an unmistakable sign of Ferenczi’s liberalism that he respected patients’ autonomy and saw psychoanalysis as a joint effort between analyst and analysand both in intellectual and emotional terms; just consider his incorporation of countertransference as part of the unconscious dialogue of transference–countertransference into psychoanalytic treatment in the early 1920s. Psychoanalysis became a system of multidirectional processes of relational elements between the patient and the analyst. Ferenczi’s positive thinking on the phenomenon of countertransference represented a fundamental shift in viewpoint (Ferenczi, 1919/1980, 1928/2006; Haynal, 1988; Cabré, 1998; Mészáros, 2004; Aron and Harris, 2010). This paved the way for psychoanalysis to become a system of interactive communication, a “relationship-based” process (Haynal 2002, p. xi) or, as Paul Roazen so aptly put it, “a two-way street” in psychoanalysis (Roazen, 2001).

Psychoanalysis presupposes the simultaneous existence of transference–countertransference relational dynamics and intrapsychic processes based on trust between analyst and analysand. A new psychoanalytic discourse developed. Communication that stressed interpretation and therapy based on teaching was replaced by the need for emotional awareness and a relationship reflective of the unconscious processes of oneself and others, while focusing on the patient’s current affective and cognitive capacities. According to Ferenczi, “over-keenness in making interpretations is one of the infantile diseases of the analyst” (Ferenczi 1928/1980, p. 96). He went on to say that:

[The analyst] has to let the patient’s free associations play upon him; simultaneously he lets his own fantasy get to work with the association material; from time to time he compares the new connections that arise with earlier results of the analysis; and not for one moment must he relax the vigilance and criticism made necessary by his own subjective trends.

(Ferenczi 1928/1980, p. 96)

As can be seen, the analyst and analysand enter into a mutually reflective relationship. A quality reflective relationship is the price to be paid for therapy. Authentic communication, as Axel Hoffer (1996) emphasized, became a fundamental requirement on the part of the psychoanalyst, as false statements result in dissociation and repeat the dynamic of previous pathological relations. In his later writings, Ferenczi often discusses false, insincere communication with the therapist as a repetition of the patient’s previous negative relationship experiences. It emerges as a way of speaking that distorts reality, both threatening the trust of the therapeutic relationship and encasing a previous traumatic experience. As we would phrase it today, false reflections result in false self-objects. The technique of using one’s countertransference and attitude of authentic communication was incorporated into the psychoanalytic method of the majority of the Budapest analysts. Michael and Alice Balint (1939), Fanny Hann-Kende (1993), and Therese Benedek, who were also close to Ferenczi, were all guided by this conviction from the early 1930s, and it had a strong impact on the development of psychoanalysis after they left Hungary. In fact, Benedek was practically among the first to teach use of the countertransference to students under her supervision at the Chicago Institute from the early 1940s (Gedo, 1993). After Ferenczi’s lectures in the United States and through Harry Stack Sullivan and one of his American analysands, some of Ferenczi’s ideas became popular among the non-conservative American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts by the late 1920s and were integrated into new theories and approaches.

With every experiment and innovation, Ferenczi endeavored to use psychoanalysis as a two-sided cooperative process between patient and analyst (Rachman, 1997). How many analysts would have signed a letter to a patient undergoing therapy with him—one in which Ferenczi was cancelling a session due to his own mother’s death—with a complimentary ending like “Kind regards, your doctor, Sándor Ferenczi”?² (emphasis mine).

Ferenczi not only considered healing itself important to changing the fates of individuals, but also thought that psychoanalysis could influence society. He thought “that there should be a reasonable individualist, socialist course between anarchism and communism which would be able to weigh precisely how much repression was necessary and inevitable to nurture a cultivated man. Necessary but no more” (Ero˝s, 2001). When Ferenczi was asked about the destructive conflict gripping Europe in 1914, he said:

The war had suddenly ripped off the mask and made people keenly aware of their true inner selves, it showed them the child inside, the primitive and the wild … The lesson to be learned here may well be this: in peacetime, let’s not be ashamed to recognise the primitive man or even the animal; it’s no shame to have such close ties to what is natural. In wartime, let’s not deny our finest cultural values, like so many cowards, and let’s not compromise them more than absolutely necessary.

(Ferenczi 1914/2000, p. 71)

One of Ferenczi’s fundamental approaches was to find optimal solutions. This was a leitmotif and a compass, of sorts, in both his personal and professional life. For example, for him optimal meant the most acceptable treatment for the patient in line with her or his own life situation, even one suffering from boils and thus in need of surgical intervention. He felt the interests of the patient, and not the personal priorities of the physician, should determine decision making. For instance, to remain with the patient with boils, quick surgical exploration and cleaning are certainly more convenient for the physician than a traditional poultice. However, incisions in inflamed tissue leave a permanent scar on the patient’s body. As Ferenczi urged, “We must do whatever we can to prevent the formation of scar tissue in women” (Ferenczi 1899/1999, p. 36). And just as he contended that “over-keenness in making interpretations is one of the infantile diseases of the analyst” (Ferenczi 1928/1980, p. 96), so too did he see such overkeenness as the “horrible streptococci” of the young physician (Ferenczi 1899/1999, p. 35). Without thinking, he said, “They hurry … to free themselves from the fear of the distant danger and simply cut the Gordian Knot in two” (Ferenczi 1899/1999, p. 35). Ferenczi himself was a young physician when he noted this phenomenon and other similarly widespread excesses in child rearing, that is, overly strong prohibitions on the part of adults that hinder children’s development.

In 1908, he wrote that moral education based on “unnecessary repression” must be replaced by a learning process based on mutual cooperation (Ferenczi 1908/1980, p. 282). His liberalism was naturally critical of the principle of authority, which not only had an unhealthy effect on human relationships, but also represented a retarding force in terms of scientific progress. Ferenczi often argued that if new experiences cannot be matched to existing theories, then it is not the validity of the experience that must be called into question. One can find this attitude from the very beginning of his work (see Ferenczi’s earliest scientific paper on spiritism, 1899) through his clinical experiments with active techniques until the end of his life with mutual analysis. As we all know, experiments and their results are always influenced by the critical attitude of those who represent the current mainstream. It was the fate of Ferenczi, too, who had a creative mind and was not nearly as emotionally independent as he was intellectually autonomous. Ferenczi suffered a lot from Freud’s criticism.

The principle of finding the optimal also appeared in the thinking of many other authors. Margaret Mahler, who was close to Ferenczi, considers terms such as “optimal symbiosis” (Mahler 1967, p. 746), in which she describes the process of separation and individuation as the psychological birth of the individual, the “ordinary devoted mother” (Mahler 1961, p. 345). Winnicott’s brilliant term of the “good enough mother” (Winnicott 1953, p. 94) alludes to optimal motherly behavior.

In the early 1930s, Ferenczi, Michael Balint, and his wife Alice Balint, as well as the young Therese Benedek, all worked with their patients the way we do today. The transference–countertransference dynamic was part of the psychoanalytic process, including the first interview and first anamnesis (Lévy, 1933). They were also aware of the main principles of the early object relationship. Most members of the first two generations of the Budapest psychoanalysts spoke a common language. A shared knowledge base had accumulated by the time they emigrated, one to which everyone enjoyed access. This was carried on with one person at a time taking out one link in the chain of collected knowledge and forging it further, modifying and reshaping the original idea. For example, Lajos Lévy, who was a charismatic internist, a key figure in early psychosomatics, and the physician to both the Ferenczi and Freud families, put it as follows in his report on first patient interviews: “We [must] recognize the patient’s physical and mental individuality. Indeed, the task of the physician is not to cure the ailment but the ailing individual” (Lévy 1933, p. 301). He also observed that “the subtle play of the facial expressions that accompany complaints arouses in us an almost unconscious resonance” (Lévy 1933, p. 303). Just like Georg Groddeck, Ferenczi, Balint, and Lévy clearly grasped how the patient communicates her or his illness and how the transference–countertransference dynamic of the doctor–patient relationship can be used in understanding this unconscious communication. However, it was Michael Balint who took this notion the furthest, being the first to discuss this dynamic in a study in 1926 (Balint, 1926; Mészáros, 2009) and then, in 1957, publishing what is still a standard book on the subject, The Doctor, His Patient and the Illness (Balint, 1957a). One can recognize in this title the notion expressed by Lévy, “the task of the physician is not to cure the ailment, but the ailing individual” (Lévy 1933, p. 301), which had by then clearly become part of the shared knowledge base of the Budapest psychoanalysts of the day.

“Right down to the Mothers”—The Early Object Relationship

Ferenczi sensed the significance of the mother–infant relationship early on. He was referring to it in The Clinical Diary when he wrote: during analysis we must probe deep, “right down to the mothers” (Ferenczi 1932/1988, p. 74).

Ferenczi knew about, and described, the fact that a child left to himself or herself, unwelcome or emotionally rejected, or one brought up without love, can even die (Ferenczi, 1929/1980). This recognition later appeared in work on hospitalization syndrome, made famous in the United States by Hungarian-born psychoanalyst René A. Spitz. The notion of the emotional needs of a child was there very early on in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, when he wrote, for example, of the child’s need for tenderness (Sullivan, 1953). This phrase was introduced to the psychoanalytic literature by Ferenczi (1933) in his last paper “Confusion of Tongues.” Tenderness and love—these are the elements of the optimal primary object relationship between the baby and the mother. According to Ferenczi and Balint, this love is not tied to any erogenous zone. Without this primary love, optimal development is not possible for the baby. The dominant biosocial view of emotional development maintains that the mother and infant form an affective communication system in which the mother has the fundamental role in modulating the baby’s affective and mental states. Similarly, Winnicott wrote “A baby can be fed without love, but lovelessness or impersonal management cannot succeed in producing a new autonomous human child” (Winnicott 1971, p. 108)³. Numerous research findings in modern attachment theory verified the previous empirical studies (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980; Fonagy, 2001).

Psychoanalysis and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

Today, when we consider the interdisciplinarity of psychoanalys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I The Context
• PART II History
• PART III Theory and Technique
• Index