Mutual Analysis

Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory

Peter L. Rudnytsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032133836
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315280110
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Sándor Ferenczi's mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn—the patient known as R.N. in the Clinical Diary—is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. In his latest groundbreaking work, Peter L. Rudnytsky draws on a trove of archival sources to provide a definitive scholarly account of this experiment, which constitutes a paradigm for relational psychoanalysis, as Freud's self-analysis does for classical psychoanalysis.

In Part 1, Rudnytsky tells the story of Severn's life and traces the unfolding of her ideas, culminating in The Discovery of the Self. He shows how her book contains disguised case histories not only of Ferenczi and Severn herself—and thereby forms an indispensable companion volume to Ferenczi's Clinical Diary—but also of Severn's daughter Margaret, an internationally acclaimed dancer whose history of childhood sexual abuse uncannily replicated Severn's own. Part 2 compares Severn to Clara Thompson and Izette de Forest as transmitters of Ferenczi's legacy, sets the record straight about Ferenczi's final illness, and reveals how Severn went beyond Freud and Groddeck in her capacity as Ferenczi's analyst. Finally, in Part 3, Rudnytsky delineates the contrast between Freud and Ferenczi as men and thinkers and makes it clear why he agrees with Erich Fromm that Ferenczi's example demonstrates how Freud's attitude need not be that of all analysts.

The first comprehensive study of Ferenczi's mutual analysis with Severn, this book is a profound reexamination of Ferenczi's relationship to Freud and an impassioned defense of Severn and Ferenczi's views on the nature and treatment of trauma. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, especially to relational analysts, self psychologists, and trauma theorists.

Part 1

Conceptions

DOI: 10.4324/9781315280134-2

Chapter 1

Traces of a Life

DOI: 10.4324/9781315280134-3

Elizabeth Severn, who became “R.N.” in Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary, was not always Elizabeth Severn. Born on November 17, 1879 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she began life as Leota Loretta Brown. In her autobiography, her daughter Margaret Severn (1988) states, “my parents came from the Chicago area” (p. 1), and baby and child photographs of Leota taken in a Chicago studio are preserved in the Severn Archives in the Library of Congress. Leota’s father, Marcus M. Brown (b. December 31, 1854, Batavia, IL–d. May 12, 1909, Cleveland, OH), was a successful attorney. His marriage to her mother, Harriet (“Mattie”) Maria Mann (b. August 26, 1856, Elgin, IL–d. 1956, Batavia, IL), took place in Batavia on April 8, 1876. Although this was Harriet’s second marriage, her tombstone, surprisingly, carries the inscription Harriet Mann Armstrong, the surname being that of her first husband, Robert Armstrong, who was born in Scotland on November 15, 1841. Leota was Marcus and Harriet Brown’s only child.

At the age of eighteen, Leota Brown married Charles Kenneth Heywood (b. February 14, 1876, Carter, TN–d. February 2, 1945, Johnson City, TN) in Chicago on August 15, 1898. The 1900 census lists Charles Heywood as residing in Chicago with Leota’s mother, identified as a “teacher” and “widow,” although Marcus Brown did not die until 1909. Presumably, Leota was living there as well. From the evidence, as it emerges from Severn’s analysis with Ferenczi, that Marcus Brown perpetrated horrific acts of sexual and physical abuse on his daughter, I would conjecture that this led Harriet to consider him, too, as “dead” to her and eventually to revert to the name of her literally deceased first husband, which she then preserved on her tombstone.

Charles and Leota’s only child, Margaret Harvey Heywood, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on August 14, 1901. In what turns out to have been a tragic irony, her middle name was given in honor of her paternal grandfather, Harvey S. Heywood. Margaret (1988) recounts that her parents “had been lured south by the promise of a position for my father as an accountant,” but “apparently this did not work out well for within a year they returned to Illinois with me and our two cats” (p. 1). She adds, “I adored my mother but had a strong feeling of dislike for my father.” When her parents were first married, Margaret believes, “they were very romantically in love, but by the time I was four years old they had decided to separate” (p. 2). During a family meeting in Chicago, Margaret hid under an “ugly maple table” as she heard her mother “arguing violently” with her father and her Uncle Harry and Aunt Rose about who was to have custody of the child. The Heywoods promised Leota that the discussion would be continued on the following day, so she left Harry’s home where the meeting was taking place, but early in the morning Margaret’s father returned and “whisked me away to the home of his parents in Wayne, Michigan” (p. 3). After this abduction in 1905, Margaret continues, “I did not see my mother for two years,” and “I never saw my father again.” Charles Heywood became the auditor and assistant manager of the Whiting Manufacturing Company, a lumber business, and subsequently married Hattie Moore, with whom he had four children.

What befell Margaret—who was told that her mother was “very ill” and thought she must be dead, causing her to want “to die myself in order to be with her” (p. 5)—during the time she spent with her grandparents in Wayne will be revealed in Chapter 6. For her part, the desolate Leota remained in Chicago, where she “attended what must have been a very remarkable though short period of study with a certain Dr. Levitt,” whose “system was similar to what today might be called ‘Positive Thinking’ with a Theosophical turn added to it, but at that time it was known as ‘New Thought’ ” (pp. 12–13). New Thought was based on the teachings of the mesmerist and inventor Phineas Quimby, the mentor of Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science. The “Dr. Levitt” instanced by Margaret was C. Franklin Leavitt, M.D., possessed of a piercing gaze and the author of treatises promoting his own brand of New Thought, including Leavitt-science: the Power-Path to Mental and Physical Poise and Achievement (1900) and Mental and Physical Ease and Supremacy; Being a Practical Adaptation of Leavitt-science to Individual Use (1914).¹ The experience with Leavitt “seems to have changed the course of her life,” and from it Leota “gained the courage and self-confidence” that “enabled her, despite her own ill health” (p. 13), which was, in fact, a severe breakdown following the collapse of her marriage and the kidnapping of her daughter, to begin to believe that she might be of aid and comfort to others. As Leota wrote to her mother in Denver on April 18, 1907, “I am going to work now to become a healer myself. There is no question but that I have the power” (qtd. in Fortune, 1993, p. 104).

Leota’s recovery also enabled her, in Margaret’s (1988) words, “to rescue me from the Wayne situation and take the daring risk of a long train ride across the continent, where my father would be unlikely to find us” (p. 13). One day, as she was eating a jelly sandwich in the yard of a neighbor near her school, Margaret “heard the most beautiful sound I have ever heard in my whole life. It was the voice of my mother calling, ‘Hoo, hoo!’ ” (p. 9). Fighting fire with fire, Leota, “so thin and pale that she looked more like an apparition than a living person,” after embracing her daughter, said, “ ‘Come quickly,’ ” quelling the protests of Margaret’s caretaker with the outcry, “ ‘I am her mother. Tell them they will never get her away from me again!’ ” (pp. 9–10). In a rescue operation that was also a retaliatory abduction, Leota and her still-very-young daughter boarded a train to Chicago, where they changed for another one that “transported us to a far city—San Antonio, Texas—and a new life” (p. 10).

Upon their arrival in San Antonio, Leota, “down to her last ten dollars, found a job, going from house to house trying to sell encyclopedias” (p. 12). When she realized from her conversations with prospective customers that “the last thing in the world they had need of was an encyclopedia,” Leota instead “discussed with them their lives and their problems,” selling few books but putting into practice the resolution in her letter to her mother. Every week, Leota scrimped to save fifty cents to have her knee-length hair washed at a beauty parlor. When a favored client became indignant because a masseuse had failed to keep her appointment, the slightly built Leota surprised the assembled company by volunteering to give the heavy-set woman the massage herself. So pleased was the woman that she returned the next day for another massage, bringing her friends. “In addition to having the magic touch of a natural healer,” Margaret observes, her mother “had had training in philosophy and psychology at the University of Chicago,” though without taking a degree of any kind.

Having mustered the courage to reclaim her daughter and begin life anew in San Antonio, Leota, by going door to door as an encyclopedia saleswoman and then by discovering her gifts as a “natural healer” at the beauty parlor, where she “combined her physical treatments with suggestion and mental affirmations,” gained a measure of economic independence, as a consequence of which she “engaged a room in a hotel where she could see her patients” (p. 13), thereby setting herself up in private practice for the first time. Although Margaret had already expressed her emotions through dance while still in her grandparents’ custody in Wayne, she “determined immediately” to become a professional dancer in San Antonio after beholding a “skirt dancer” (p. 14) in a vaudeville performance. “Incidentally,” Margaret adds, “this decision was fortified by a certain Professor Dahl, a mystic with whom my mother was continuing her music studies, having had to abandon these at the time of her marriage.” This “Professor Dahl” turns out to have been a figure of historical importance, since Nikolai Dahl (1860–1939) was a Russian physician and psychologist, as well as a viola player, who is reported not only to have read Charcot’s works but to have trained with him in Paris. In 1900, Dahl treated Sergei Rachmaninov using suggestion and hypnotherapy after the composer suffered a breakdown and a creative block due to the disastrous reception of his Symphony No. 1 (1897), in gratitude for which Rachmaninov dedicated his Piano Concerto No. 2 (1901) to Dahl. How this Russian, who emigrated from Moscow to Beirut in 1925, came to be in San Antonio is a mystery, but as Margaret and her mother had the satisfaction of verifying years later, Dahl was not boasting when he told Leota that “he had been instrumental in helping Rachmaninov overcome the extreme depression which had enveloped him when one of his early compositions met with disheartening failure.”

Although Margaret describes Dahl as a “mystic,” through her musical studies with a follower of Charcot’s Leota Brown Heywood had come into contact with the world of European depth psychology, and this period in San Antonio, building on her empowerment by Leavitt in Chicago, marks the second stage in her journey of self-discovery that would take her to Budapest and Ferenczi. It was in San Antonio that Leota “obtained a divorce and a legal change of name, so we could really feel safe and say good-bye to the past forever” (p. 20). Why she chose the name Elizabeth Severn has never been conclusively explained, though Elizabeth has regal connotations and Rachman (2018) has surmised that her surname “was taken from the river Severn” (p. 90), the longest in Britain, running for 220 miles from its source in the mountains of Wales through Shrewsbury, before flowing into the Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel.² Whereas the name of the river is pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, Severn, Elizabeth’s surname should be pronounced Severn, as is confirmed by the fact that it was misspelled “Severne” in the typescript of her interview with Eissler, before Severn (in one of her meticulous handwritten corrections) crossed out the last letter. Whatever its determinants, Margaret’s references to feeling safe and saying goodbye to the past make it clear that Severn’s act of self-creation was spurred by the desire to render her and her daughter more difficult to track down by her estranged husband should he ever take it into his head to come after them.

By 1911, Severn had grown “tired of the Texas climate and longed for the mountains that she loved. So we again boarded a train and set out for Colorado, where her mother was living” (p. 20). Being unhappy at a Montessori boarding school in Boulder, Margaret moved in with her grandmother Mattie, whom she called “Amma,” in Denver, while Elizabeth “occupied a suite at the Brown Palace Hotel in the center of town, where she pursued her work as usual.” Both in San Antonio and in Denver, and thereafter in Washington, D.C., where she and Margaret also resided briefly, Severn made herself known by giving public lectures and represented herself variously as a “Metaphysician and Healer,” “Metaphysician and Psychologist,” and “Teacher and Healer.” As Margaret recollects:

She had a very charismatic personality and was an excellent speaker so there was no difficulty in attracting patients or in keeping them, because she was always able to help and heal them. People found her to be an inspiration and felt better for just coming into her presence. She accepted only a limited number at a time as she preferred to concentrate with great intensity on the particular problems of each individual.

In 1912, while in Washington, she obtained a passport under the name of Elizabeth Severn. Emulating her mother, Severn designated herself a “widow,” even though her husband was still living. In another fabrication that might be viewed as a symptom of the problems addressed two years earlier in the Flexner Report, which successfully sought to compel medical schools in the United States to adhere to the norms of natural science in their teaching and research—and to stigmatize as quackery or charlatanism alternative practices that ignored or rejected these evidence-based protocols—Severn’s passport listed her occupation as “physician,” notwithstanding her lack of medical qualifications or, for that matter, a formal degree of any kind; and she had no compunctions about arrogating to herself the title of “Dr.” for the rest of her life. Reflecting the emerging fault lines in the medical profession, Margaret states from her retrospective vantage point in the 1980s, “at that time there were some doctors who probably considered my mother a quack, but fortunately there were also some who did support her methods,” and “I have often had to giggle as the years passed by and I read certain pronouncements by the A.M.A. or other medical societies, about their wonderful discoveries regarding the relationship of disease, and, more recently, even organic disease, to the mental and emotional state of the patient” (p. 23), since these insights had been anticipated by her mother in her first book, Psycho-Therapy: Its Doctrine and Practice, published in London by William Rider and Son as part of its Christmas list in 1913.

Severn’s decision to set sail for England in 1912 was prompted not only by her own professional aspirations but also by the desire to further Margaret’s training as a dancer. For a time, the itinerant pair rented “a very old and romantic looking dwelling called Stone Cottage” (p. 30) near the town of Epsom, in Surrey. Their delight in this residence was, however, tempered by the fact that “my mother was always taken ill when she sat in the dining room,” a phenomenon that became explicable when they learned that the ancient pile “had once been used as an insane asylum, and this particular room had been the place where the most violently demented persons were confined.” As Severn was “always ultra-sensitive to thought waves,” she “was apparently overwhelmed by the vibrations of pain, fear, and grief which had clung to the spot,” so they decamped and came to London by the end of the year. Severn’s susceptibility to being haunted by the sufferings of the previous inmates of Stone Cottage is glossed by the parapsychological researcher and maverick psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, with whom she would subsequently form an important relationship. As Fodor remarked in an intervi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Prelude: Ferenczi’s Secret Life
• Part 1 Conceptions
• Part 2 Contexts
• Part 3 Consequences
• References
• Index