Splitting, fragmenting, and mental agony: the clinical thinking of Sándor Ferenczi

Abstract

Following a thorough study of the Clinical Diary (1932), the author aims to put forward Sándor Ferenczi's theoretical discoveries, which allow him to settle a very advanced clinical consideration. The main parameters of this consideration foreshadow those that, in the following decades, were to be at the centre of some of the most significant developments in psychoanalysis, in particular those of M. Klein, W. R. Bion and D. W. Winnicott.

Keywords:

• death drive
• despair
• disintegration
• narcissistic splitting
• projective identification

Notes

Though Freud had already sensed that splitting played a major role in certain mental states (especially in the psychoses and the perversions) he had yet to write his seminal paper on the subject, ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (4).

The italics are Ferenczi's.

Ferenczi's description of these states of mind would later be taken up and further developed by Winnicott (1945) and by Klein (1946) in terms of the ‘unintegrated ego’, ‘ego disintegration’, and ‘falling to pieces’.

The italics are Ferenczi's.