An extract of the analysis of the Monkey Puzzle Boy

Abstract

A client who wants his story to be made into a case history presents for psychoanalysis. An artist all his adult life, he expresses his sexual trauma through his art. His more recent artistic output is in the form of avant-garde video montages. The analysis stalls, becalmed by a failure to understand a circumcision event, a punishment for sexual expression. If Ferenczi and the Budapest school model learning from therapeutic errors, freedom of thought, sincerity, and experimentation, then this case history illustrates those. Real sexual trauma and a real circumcision event are entangled with fantasy and art in attempts to come to terms with them. The circumcision event was better understood with multiple readings of Carlo Bonomi’s work, which became part of the analysis. The wider Ferenczi community also became part of the story of the analysis, and in a kind of mutuality the analysis wants to make a contribution to that body of knowledge.

Key words:

• Ferenczi
• Bonomi
• circumcision
• countertransference
• trauma

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fergal Brady

Author

Fergal Brady is President of the Irish Psycho-Analytical Association. He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice in Dundalk and Dublin, Ireland. He has presented at the International Sandor Ferenczi Conference and organized the 2019 Conference “The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: Ferenczi the Balints and Beyond,” in Dublin.