The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi

His historical and contemporary importance in psychoanalysis

Thierry Bokanowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351788571
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi provides a concise yet thorough overview of the life and work of Sandor Ferenczi. It seeks to help make his thought and work better known, as a controversial pioneering psychoanalyst whose importance to psychoanalysis has sometimes been wrongfully neglected and relegated to backstage.

Including excerpts from his most important papers, this book gives the reader a clear guide to the major tenets of Ferenczi's work, the psychoanalytic context in which his significant achievements occurred, and the continued importance of his work for contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Thierry Bokanowski examines Ferenczi's work in three main stages:

1. A first period of contribution to Freud's work (1908-1914)

2. A second period of the deployment of Ferenczi's own thought and work (1914-1925)

3. A third period of calling concepts into question and advancing new concepts (1926-1933)

Bokanowski offers a detailed analysis of these three periods, illustrating them vividly by analysing Ferenczi's numerous and very famous articles or books during these periods in a way that allows his very original way of thinking to unfold. He then examines at the theoretical level the heritage of Ferenczi's hypotheses developed across these three time spans.

Covering Ferenczi's relationship with Freud and with other early psychoanalysts, and his role in formulating well-established concepts such as introjection, countertransference and narcissistic splitting, The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi provides an essential and accessible read for any student or clinician of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy seeking to apply Ferenczi's work in the present and understand the historical development of psychoanalytic ideas.

Part I

The modernity of Sándor Ferenczi

Chapter 1

The modernity of Sándor Ferenczi

A contemporary of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), for whom he was simultaneously a disciple, a patient, a friend and a confidant, Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) was not only a prestigious psychoanalyst, but was also an analyst who may be considered as ‘exceptional’.

He was ‘exceptional’ in the sense that, throughout the entire period when he was involved as a practitioner and theorist of psychoanalysis, he occupied a place of ‘exception’ both with Freud and within the psychoanalytic community, of which he was one of the most active and innovative members: of all his contemporaries, he was unquestionably the first to indicate the new directions and paths of modern clinical psychoanalysis.

With his original, bold and creative mind, as well as his extreme concern to eschew all dogmatism and to preserve complete autonomy in thought and action, Ferenczi created an oeuvre that seems today to be one of the most endearing that psychoanalysis nurtured in his time. Inspired by a permanently creative imagination − an imagination often accompanied by a truly poetic and epic feeling − it is constantly permeated by the dazzling intuitions of its author.

According to those (of whom Freud was the first) who witnessed his evolution from the very beginning of his career as a psychoanalyst, which lasted 25 years (1908–1933), Ferenczi imposed himself as an innovative and fruitful theoretician and as a clinician reputed for his unusual talent as a therapist. After training as a doctor and practising medicine for a long time in Budapest before becoming a psychoanalyst, he saw therapeutic efficacy as an essential imperative of psychoanalytic ethics. Keen to understand the obstacles and ‘limits’ that he came up against in the course of certain treatments, he resolved, after more than a decade of analytic practice, to pay particular attention to psychoanalytic technique. From there, he was soon persuaded that technique, an indispensable complement to theory, could and should be modified, adapted and developed in the light of the necessities imposed by the requirements of analytic treatment. The difficulties that he encountered in his analyses, difficulties associated with the complex structures of the patients that he liked to take into treatment (serious character disorders, as if personalities, narcissistic structures, ‘borderline cases’ and so on) led him gradually to envisage a series of technical and theoretical conceptions that would be the source of a renewal and mutation of certain hitherto established theoretical and practical parameters.

During the last 10 years of his life, therefore, Ferenczi tried to highlight the idea that in order to analyse and elaborate certain psychic impasses inherent to the treatment of complex situations, the analyst, in the light of his countertransference listening, must try to modify certain aspects of the classical analytic setting. In his view, paradoxically, these reinforce in the analytic relationship, on the patient’s side, a ‘confusion of tongues’ that is initially traumatic. So, at the same time, he was gradually led to attempt the exploration of psychic zones in which the symbolic no longer has any currency, zones that may account for the impediments and capacities for unbinding the primordial functioning of the psyche.

In spite of the fact that these technical innovations and the theoretical conceptions that followed from them (particularly where traumatism and the traumatic are concerned) were in the very last years of Ferenczi’s life – between 1929 and 1933 – at the origin of his dissensions with Freud, it seems nonetheless that these advances inaugurated a turning point in the very history of certain key concepts in psychoanalysis on which every psychoanalyst today draws more or less directly, both in theory and in practice.

By way of example, let me cite the following: the concept of introjection; the interest and importance of certain aspects of regression in the psychoanalytic treatment; the importance for the analyst of putting the ‘work’ of his countertransference in the service of the treatment and hence of having pursued his own analysis as far as possible (the ‘second’ fundamental rule of analysis); the problems pertaining to the termination of treatment; the importance of recognising the need of some patients during analysis to establish a primitive symbiotic relationship, and hence the importance, for understanding the transference, of attaching importance to early mother/child fantasies; the importance of the environment and of maternal psychic imprints; the metapsychological problems raised by the links and distinctions to be made between the traumatism, the traumatic and the trauma; ego-splitting and narcissistic splitting as consequences of early psychic traumatisms; the splitting between thoughts and the body (somatopsychic splitting); the importance, for some subjects, of the analyst being able to recognise the disqualifications of their affects and their sensations incidental to a traumatogenic environment (maternal ‘madness’); the importance of primary love and of primary hatred; hatred as a means of fixation that is stronger than love (the love of hatred); and so on.

This long enumeration, which only partially accounts for the vast clinical and metapsychological field explored, as well as the quantity and complexity of the problems raised, gives us an insight into the modernity of the author’s thought. Passionate about the ‘limits of analysis’, as well as by the ‘limits of the analysable’, Ferenczi was the pioneer of a long list of psychoanalysts who, subsequently, contributed to the development of a new psychoanalytic clinical practice, a new way of listening to material and a new vision of analytic treatment. In this respect, there are good grounds for affirming that Ferenczi remains, in our own time, a ‘psychoanalyst of today’.

Chapter 2

A life inscribed within the crucible of the history of the psychoanalytic movement

Very little is known of the childhood of Sándor (Alexander) Ferenczi, the eighth child of a family of 12, born in Miskolcz, Hungary on 7 July 1873.

Sándor’s father, Bernàt Fraenkel, was a Polish Jewish immigrant born in Cracow in 1830. Sustained by his enthusiasm for the liberal and progressive national Hungarian Revolution of 1848, he took part at the age of 18 in the Hungarian insurrection against Austrian domination. Thereafter, he settled in Miskolcz, where he became the manager, and later the owner, of a bookshop, to which he added a printing press, which enabled him subsequently to practise the profession of printer and publisher. In 1879, he Magyarised his name Fraenkel into Ferenczi. In 1880, he was elected President of the Chamber of Commerce in Miskolcz. He died in 1888, when Sándor was 15. Family testimonies suggest that Sándor was his father’s favourite child.

It was Sándor’s mother, Rosa Eibenschütz, born in 1840 and married in 1858, who, on her husband’s death, took over the task of running the bookshop and printing press, managing them both successfully.

Owing to his father’s profession and cultural interests, it seems that Sándor Ferenczi’s childhood was spent in an intellectually stimulating environment, from which he benefited: he was a brilliant pupil at the Protestant College in his town and, as an adolescent, wrote poems in the style of Heine and carried out experiments in hypnosis. At the end of his secondary studies, he left for Vienna to do medical studies, receiving his medical degree in 1894. After completing his military service in the Austro-Hungarian army, he established himself in Budapest. In 1897 he started working as an intern at the St Rokus hospital in a service for prostitutes, before moving on to a neurological and psychiatric unit at the St Elisabeth poor house in 1900. Then, in 1904, he entered the clinic of a health insurance cooperative. He became an expert court medical witness in 1905, a post he gave up after the First World War. He set up his own practice in 1900, working as a general practitioner and neuropsychiatrist.

Before his first meeting with Freud, at the beginning of 1908, Ferenczi had published, among other things, a certain number of articles that clearly evoked his early interests for problems of a psychic order and neuropathic affections: ‘Consciousness and development’ (1900), ‘The love of the sciences’ (1901), ‘Female homosexuality’ (1902), ‘Saturnine encephalopathy’ (1903), ‘On the therapeutic value of hypnosis’ (1904), ‘On neurasthenia’ (1905a), ‘On sexual transitional stages’ (1905b) and ‘Treatment with hypnotic suggestion’ (1906).

Ferenczi, whose mind was cultivated, eclectic and insatiably curious but nonetheless ‘restless’, as he would later describe himself, was a man whose sensibility, strong personality and desire to ‘take care of others’ soon led him to acquire significant medical, psychiatric and therapeutic experience. He had already read Freud and Breuer by the age of 20, but, as he was to report later, neither of these readings had interested him particularly: ‘In 1893, I had read the paper he wrote, along with Breuer, concerning the psychic mechanism of hysterical symptoms, and, later, another independent paper in which he discusses infantile sexual dreams as the causes or starting-points for the psycho-neuroses’ (Ferenczi, 1926b, p. 31). It was not until he became interested in Jung’s timed associative methods and, with the encouragement of a colleague, Philippe Stein, that he took up his reading of Freud again, in particular The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a); ‘this time the effect was electric’ (Jones, 1955, p. 39).

When Ferenczi sought to meet Freud, who responded favourably by suggesting that he came to Vienna on Sunday, 2 February 1908, it was the opportunity for Ferenczi to emerge from his ‘splendid isolation’. Since 1904, a relatively important group of pupils and disciples had been gathering around Freud regularly at the evenings of the Psychological Wednesday Society. Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and C.J. Jung were to join this group in 1907 and were followed in 1908 by A.A. Brill, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones and Victor Tausk (Jones, 1955, p. 9).

This meeting was decisive. Michael Balint writes that Freud ‘was apparently so impressed by Ferenczi that he invited him to present a paper at the 1st Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg in April 1908, and to join him in Berchtesgaden where Freud’s family were planning to spend their summer holidays – an unprecedented event’ (Balint, 1964, p. 9). Ernest Jones adds that Ferenczi ‘soon become a special favourite’ (Jones, 1955, p. 39).

From that moment up until 1933, the year of his death, the thread of Ferenczi’s biography may be seen as being woven around the development of the extremely close ties that he maintained with the founder of psychoanalysis, and as overlapping with the history of the psychoanalytic movement, of which he immediately became one of its most distinguished members. Today this history can be followed almost from day by day thanks to the correspondence exchanged between Freud and Ferenczi, which contains almost 1,250 letters (Freud and Ferenczi, Correspondence, vols. 1–3, 1992, 1996, 2000). This correspondence constitutes one of the most precious sources of information that we possess today concerning the private lives of the two men. Comparing it with other epistolary exchanges that Freud maintained, Jones writes that Freud’s letters to Ferenczi are ‘by far the most personal’ (Jones, 1955, p. 176).

From their very first exchanges, Ferenczi was immediately and powerfully mobilised by a massive and idealising transference onto Freud, who, as we know, never left his interlocutors feeling indifferent. This massive transference was duplicated by an immediate transference onto psychoanalysis and its corpus, which were inseparable at that time from the man Freud. Helped by Ferenczi’s remarkable aptitude to put the Freudian ferment to full use immediately – one only needs to recall the ‘master stroke’ of his article entitled ‘Introjection and transference’ (1909a), which was written one year after his meeting with Freud – this situation did not fail to seduce Freud immediately. From then on, an exceptional bond was formed between the two protagonists.

Truly a case of ‘love at first sight’, Freud and Ferenczi’s relationship was strengthened by numerous common points and centres of interest that inspired them. Freud very swiftly discovered in Ferenczi the immense aptitudes for becoming a practitioner as well as a theoretician of psychoanalysis of the first order; moreover, he saw him as one of those who would prove to be the most prepared to get involved in all the battles for the Cause (die Sache). Ferenczi, for his part, found in Freud a ‘father’ who was apparently not afraid to lean on a ‘son’ and who even seemed to be able to tolerate all the stages of Ferenczi’s struggle to assert himself and his independence.

However, Ferenczi’s character, which was enthusiastic, sensitive and generous, hungry for recognition and affection, and dominated by great spontaneity of impulse, sometimes met with a lack of reciprocity on Freud’s part. Although communicative and warm, Freud often took refuge behind his seriousness and thus imposed a kind of distance that was all the greater in that he tried to find in Ferenczi a ‘son’ who would sometimes be less sensitive and more independent. This difference in the way they managed their sensibility, which underlay their respective modes of thought, was at the root of some of the difficulties which at certain times marked their relationship.

In April 1908, Ferenczi presented his paper ‘Psycho-analysis and education’ (1908) at the 1st International Congress in Salzburg, Austria. Freud spoke for five hours about the treatment of the ‘Rat Man’. There were seven other presentations, including one by Jung on dementia praecox. During the summer, Ferenczi spent his holidays with Freud at Berchtesgaden.

In 1909, at the end of the summer, Ferenczi left for America with Freud, who had been invited by Stanley Hall, the President of Clark University, Worcester (Massachusetts) to give a series of lectures on the occasion of the University’s celebration of the twentieth year of its foundation (Freud, 1910a [1909]). Jung, who had also been invited, made the trip with them. During the crossing on the George Washington, Freud, Ferenczi and Jung analysed each other’s dreams. On their return from America, the tone of the epistolary exchanges between Freud and Ferenczi became warmer, a clear sign that the two men had established a much closer relationship. It was also at this time that Freud admitted to Ferenczi, who had congratulated him on the marriage of his elder daughter, Mathilde, to Robert Hollistcher, that the year before, in Berchtesgaden, he would have been glad if he had been the lucky one. At the end of the year, Ferenczi published ‘Introjection and transference’ (1909a).

The year 1910 saw the 2nd International Congress, which was held in Nuremburg (Germany). Jung became the first President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, whose creation Ferenczi had proposed. It was at this Congress that he presented his text, published the following year, ‘On the organization of the psychoanalytic movement’ (1911a).

In August, Freud and Ferenczi went off to visit Florence, Rome, Naples, Palermo and Syracuse. It was during this trip that the so called ‘Palermo incident’ occurred. This episode remained an important event in their relationship over the next 20 years and they often referred back to it at times of difficulty between them. This journey they made together for more than three weeks turned out to be a disappointment for both of them, as can be seen from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I The modernity of Sándor Ferenczi
• Part II The work
• Part III Choice of texts
• Afterword
• References
• Index