Ferenczi's Anticipation of the Traumatic Dimension of Language: A Meeting With Lacan

Abstract

Abstract. The work of Sándor Ferenczi anticipates various challenges of contemporary psychoanalysis—clinical, technical, and theoretical. Among the most novel is his elaboration of the concept of trauma. Ferenczi's 1930s writings were mostly read by the psychoanalysts of his time, including Freud, as a return to Freud's seduction theory. Nevertheless, in Ferenczi, there is an innovation that distinguishes him from Freud. Although today's psychoanalytic community expresses a growing interest in Ferenczi's trauma theory, the field pays less attention to his focus on the traumatic dimension of language itself and the effects language has on the subject. In fact, Ferenczi's later work uniquely explores the relationship between trauma and language. In part, what makes Ferenczi's trauma theory unique is that it anticipates Jacques Lacan's work on the traumatic dimension of language, which the French psychoanalyst referred to in his final theoretical production through the concept of lalangue.

Keywords:

• confusion of tongues
• Ferenczi
• infans
• Lacan
• lalangue
• trauma

Notes

¹ Finally, other fundamental concepts of Ferenczi's work, such as the “identification with the aggressor” (Frankel, 2002, 2004), and psychic splitting (Gutiérrez-Peláez, 2010) have also been extensively reviewed.

² Excommunicated.

³ Barzilai (1997) and Granoff (2004) have explored other related aspects of Lacan's and Ferenczi's work.

⁴ Jouissance, translated in English as “enjoyment,” must be understood differently from—and opposed to—what Freud conceptualized as the pleasure principle. Jouissance is beyond the pleasure principle. As stated by Zizek (1993), “enjoyment (jouissance, Genuss) is not to be equated with pleasure (Lust): ‘enjoyment is precisely ‘Lust im Unlust’; it designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the ‘pleasure principle.’ In other words, enjoyment is located ‘beyond the pleasure principle’” (p. 280).

⁵ In Lacan, the big Other is the symbolic order itself, but, secondarily, it also designates “radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification” (Evans, 1996, p. 136).

⁶ If that rejection were successful, the infant would not enter into the symbolic order. It is not absolute either, for a substrate of lalangue prevails in the speaking subject.

⁷ Related to body temperature that changes with the variations in temperature of the environment.

⁸ “Bioanalysis” is a term used by Ferenczi. It can be found in Thalassa and in “Masculine and Feminine” (Ferenczi, 1930). It is also a term used by Freud in his obituary of Ferenczi. As Judit Mészáros (2014) states: “In his bioanalysis within his book Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (Ferenczi, 1989/1924), he described the melding of the biological and psychological functioning of the human being. This work, which would become known simply as Thalassa, discusses the current emergence of the onto- and phylogenetic instinctive tendencies in the human sexual drive” (p. 6).

⁹ “Topology is increasingly seen as a radically non-metaphorical way of exploring the symbolic order and its interactions with the real and the imaginary. … The Borromean knot, so called because the figure is found on the coat of arms of the Borromeo family, is a group of three rings which are linked in such a way that if any one of them is severed, all three become separated” (Evans, 1996, p. 19).

¹⁰ “Whenever Lacan uses the term ‘discourse’ (rather than, say, ‘speech’) it is in order to stress the transindividual nature of language, the fact that speech always implies another subject, an interlocutor. Thus the famous Lacanian formula, ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the other’ (which first appears in 1953, and later becomes ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’) designates the unconscious as the effects on the subject of speech that is addressed to him from elsewhere; by another subject who has been forgotten, by another psychic locality (the other scene)” (Evans, 1996, p. 45).

¹¹ Freud (1905/1953) referred to the analogy of painting and therapy, and psychoanalysis and sculpture: “There is, actually, the greatest possible antithesis between suggestive and analytic technique—the same antithesis which, in regard to the fine arts, the great Leonardo da Vinci summed up in the formulas: per via di pone and per via di levare. Painting, says Leonardo, works per via di pone, for it applies a substance—particles of colour—where there was nothing before, on the colourless canvas; sculpture, however, proceeds per via di levare, since it takes away from the block of stone all that hides the surface of the statue contained in it. In a similar way, the technique of suggestion aims at proceeding per via di pone; it is not concerned with the origin, strength and meaning of the morbid symptoms, but instead, it superimposes something—a suggestion—in the expectation that it will be strong enough to restrain the pathogenic idea from coming to expression. Analytic therapy, on the other hand, does not seek to add or to introduce anything new, but to take away something, to bring out something; and to this end concerns itself with the genesis of the morbid symptoms and the psychical context of the pathogenic idea which it seeks to remove” (pp. 260–261).

¹² Ferenczi defines this as follows: “What is traumatic is the unforeseen, the unfathomable, the incalculable… Unexpected, eternal threat, the sense of which one cannot grasp, is unbearable” (Dupont, 1988, p. 171).

¹³ As Ferenczi wrote in his Clinical Diary: “In infants these protective devices are not yet developed, so that infants communicate with the environment over a much broader surface. If we had the means to get such a child to tell us what this hypersensitivity makes him capable of, we would probably know much more about the world than our narrow horizon now allows” (Dupont, 1988, p. 148).

¹⁴ It is impossible not to link this “babble” of the child to that “Babel” of the “confusion of tongues” and the resonances of that Biblical myth in Ferenczi's paradigmatic paper (Gutiérrez-Peláez, 2012).

¹⁵ “After their meeting in the previous September, Freud and Ferenczi did not again discuss their differences. Freud's feeling for him never changed, and Ferenczi remained on at least outwardly friendly terms. They continued to exchange letters, the burden of which was mainly Ferenczi's increasingly serious state of health. The medical treatment was successful in holding the anemia itself at bay, but in March, the disease, as it sometimes does, attacked the spinal chord and brain, and for the last couple of months of his life he was unable to stand or walk; this undoubtedly exacerbated his latent psychotic trends” (Jones, 1953, p. 176; emphasis added).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez

Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst living in Bogotá, Colombia. He is a psychologist from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) of Bogotá, Colombia, and received his Master in Psychoanalysis and Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. Currently he is professor at the Psychology Program in the Rosario University in Bogotá and works in private practice in psychoanalysis. He is a member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP/WAP) and the Nueva Escuela Lacaniana (NEL).