A Visit to the Budapest School

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Notes

As Freud’s break with Jung was unfolding in 1913, Ferenczi wrote a critical review of a paper on libido that Jung had published, and in telling Freud (Freud/Ferenczi, I, p. 484) about the review he offered a succinct catalogue of the ideas about occultism that he and Freud rejected: “I have finally arrived at the most secret meaning of Jung’s paper. It is none other than his hidden confession of occultism in the guise of science. Dreams tell the future; neurotics are mantically endowed people who foretell the future of the human race (progress, repression of sexuality). The unconscious knows the present, past, and future; the fate (i.e., the task) of humanity is revealed in symbols … . The little he has seen of the ‘occult’ was sufficient to bring down the obviously very shaky edifice of his psychoanalytic knowledge.”.

On July 24, 1915, Ferenczi (Freud/Ferenczi, II. p. 70) wrote to Freud about his “urge toward de-occultization, at the base of which there may be, in the final analysis, magic-religious strivings, which I am defending myself against by wanting to bring clarity to these matters. I am convinced of the actuality of thought transference. I believe, incidentally, that even an indication that prophecies are possible could or should not force one to abandon the scientific basis. Certainly I know of no proven case of foretelling the future.” In his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi indicated (1988, p. 47) that his patient RN (Elizabeth Severn) believed in telepathic healing, but not even in the privacy of his diary did he say that he himself was a believer.

As early as 1909, in a paper called “Introjection and Transference,” Ferenczi had supported the mimetic origin of language, citing the work of Kleinpaul (Das Stromgwebeit der Sprache, 1893), which Karl Abraham had written about in Traum und Mythos (1909): “man succeeds in representing the whole audible and inaudible environment by means of the ego, no form of introjection or projection remaining untried thereby.”.

The first published vignettes about thought transference between adults and children gained from clinical work were written not by a Hungarian but by Dorothy Burlingham, who was very much interested in psychoanalytic investigations of the occult. The original 1935 version of her paper “Child Analysis and the Mother” was written in German (in Anna Freud’s style): then it appeared in English (also in 1935) and finally was collected by George Devereux (a Hungarian émigré to America, trained in anthropology) for his very interesting and neglected 1953 volume Psychoanalysis and the Occult. The vignette seems likely to be about Dorothy Burlingham herself, as a mother who was in analysis (with Freud) at the same time that her children were in analysis (with Anna Freud): “The most striking example that I know of a child being influenced by his mother’s thoughts is the following. The mother was in analysis and in her hour she had a fantasy of throwing a jug of boiling water over someone when in a rage. She had witnessed a similar scene in her childhood. An hour later she was sitting at the table with her children. The younger child quarreled with his older sister. He suddenly left the table and returned a few seconds later carrying a glass of steaming water. He advanced on his sister crying: ‘You will see what I will do to you,’ and he threatened her with the water. The action was entirely unusual and unexpected from him. Where would such an occurrence fit in the child’s analysis? Had it really anything to do with the child? If not, what is this strange form of communication?”.

In “The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique” (1928, p. 89) Ferenczi, describing tact, concludes: “Before the physician decides to tell the patient something, he must temporarily withdraw his libido from the latter, and weigh the situation coolly; he must in no circumstances allow himself to be guided by his feelings alone.”.

The founding group was Ferenczi, Istvan Hollos, Lajos Levy (a physician, married to Kata Levy, later an associate of Anna Freud’s), Sandor Rado, and Hugo Ignotus (a publisher and Freud’s translator).

Phyllis Greenacre commented (1966): “It is my impression that in early psychoanalytic theory, anchored too strongly on the libido theory, there was too exclusive an emphasis on orality in the first phase of life, and that the importance of clinging (Hermann, 1936), touch, smell, vision, and kinesthetic stimulation was insufficiently appreciated.”.

When Michael Balint prepared a birthday essay for Melanie Klein in 1952, he did speak of part-objects (pp. 244 –265, passim) but this seems to have been a diplomatic exception in a paper actually dedicated to a very strong critique of the primacy Klein attributed to the paranoid position (with its emphasis on part-objects) over the depressive position. In Balint’s view, as in that of the whole Budapest School, loss of love (of the archaic primary love) is the first step of development out of the original “harmonious mix up” of baby and mother—and it entails depression (or what might be called a primary depressive position).

Ferenczi did not reject the notion of primary narcissism, which was so important a part of Freud’s second instinct theory. His followers came to this position on their own, as is apparent in a footnote that Michael Balint added in 1954 to Alice Balint’s book The Early Years of Life, which dates from 1931. She had made the claim (following Freud and Ferenczi) that an infant in the first stage of development “has no need of anybody in particular to love in order to gratify the wishes arising from its primitive sexuality.” Michael Balint commented: “This was the generally accepted theory in the early ’thirties. Since then, important developments have taken place, among them that outlined in A. Balint’s ‘Love for the Mother and Mother-love’ [in German in 1939]. For present purposes it is only necessary to note that in that paper the author calls attention to the ‘archaic love’ between infant and mother, ‘the fundamental condition of which is the complete harmony of interests.’” Michael Balint is crediting his wife with the recognition of “archaic love,” and this makes her paper the “new beginning” of the Budapest School after Ferenczi’s death. Unfortunately, she herself died in the year of its publication, 1939.

In a 1933 paper called “Two Notes on the Erotic Component of the Ego Instincts,” Michael Balint imagined an instinctual drive continuum with ego instincts and their functions at one side, sexual instincts and their functions at the other. Moving across the continuum, one would find the sexual instinct more and more intermingled with the ego instincts. “Such a line could be constructed as follows: heart beat … breathing… muscular activity … intake of fluids … of solids … the diverse excretory functions … the considerably erotised ‘herd instincts,’ such as ambition, domination, submissiveness, etc … . and lastly one could include the various character traits which in an adult certainly appear to be of a libidinal nature, but which doubtless contain also a strong ego-component, such as: obstinacy, steadiness, envy, but also magnanimity, generosity, cold-bloodedness, imperturbability, etc. Such a series could be continued further in both directions, and many more items could be inserted.” Muscular activity includes the function of clinging; the next step in line is being fed (orality), and the next excretory functions (anality). That is, Balint is stressing the underlying ego-instinctual and relational aspects of the Freudian libidinal stages and noting that clinging precedes the stages in which libido begins to be commingled with ego interests.

Freud’s first summary statements about psychosis are to be found in the Schreber case (1909, p. 70); then, as he developed his structural theory, he summarized the view that followed from it three times, in “Neurosis and Psychosis” (1924), in “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis” (1924), and in “Fetishism” (1927), where he points in the direction of the notion of splitting of the ego that Ferenczi was developing at the same time.

Ferenczi had started thinking about psychosis in the terms Freud used, but he had always emphasized introjection and projection. He wrote in 1909: “The dement completely detaches his interest from the outer world and becomes autoerotic (Jung, Abraham). The paranoiac, as Freud has pointed out, would like to do the same, but cannot and so projects onto the outer world the interest that has become a burden to him … . Whereas the paranoiac expels from his ego the impulses that have become unpleasant, the neurotic helps himself by taking into the ego as large as possible a part of the outside world, making it the object of unconscious fantasies” (p. 47).