Trauma and healing: from ‘furor sanandi’ to ‘animus sanandi’

Abstract

In his last period (1928–33), Ferenczi tried to complement the ‘negative’ technical principles first introduced by Freud in the 1910s. He introduced diverse and successive ‘positive instructions’, and specific techniques known as ‘elastic’ of ‘relaxation and neocatharsis’, and also made an unsucessful attempt to introduce ‘mutual analysis’. These techniques are implemented around a series of new technical principles including ‘tact’, ‘empathy’, ‘indulgence’, ‘intense sympathy’. All of these positive technical principles and innovations demonstrate the importance of considering the dimension of ‘healing’ in all analytic experiences and the importance of the analyst's functioning as the ‘healer’. The emphasis on the use of these new technical principles is consistent with the emphasis Ferenczi places upon countertransference and traumatic factors in psychopathogenesis.

Keywords:

• ‘positive instructions’
• healing
• healer
• countertransference
• psychic trauma

Notes

Author's italics.

Actually, the discrepancy concerning ‘tact’ dates from way before this exchange in 1928. In 1908 (Actual – and Psycho‐Neuroses in the Light of Freud's Investigations and Psycho‐Analysis), the disciple writes: ‘This analysis requires (…) a great deal of psychological sense and tact.’ In 1910 (‘Wild’ psycho‐analysis), the master ‘replies’: ‘Psychoanalysis substitutes the demand for indefinite ‘medical tact’, which aspires to some sort of special faculty, with precise technical precepts’.

I disagree with M. Balint (18) when he portrays his master's conception on traumatism as occurring in two moments, and bestows unto himself (6) the conceptualization of the three moments. These three moments were already in ‘Confusion …’, although Ferenczi does not ‘number’ them.

Which in 1928 leads him to fool himself when he states: “I have the definitive impression that (…) differences in analytic technique are tending to disappear” (Fer 1928), and at times even makes him place the chariot in front of the horses by giving more priority to the method than to the process (Bokanowski 1992).