Ferenczi and Freud – From psychoanalysis as a “professional and personal home” to the creation of a “psychoanalytic home” for the patient¹

1 This article is a modified and enlarged version of the paper given in Florence in May 2018 at the XIIIth International Sándor Ferenczi Conference.

Abstract

The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a “professional and personal home” that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar “psychoanalytic home.” As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.

Key words:

• Ferenczi
• Freud
• correspondence
• professional
• personal and psychoanalytic home
• Clinical diary

Notes

1 This article is a modified and enlarged version of the paper given in Florence in May 2018 at the XIIIth International Sándor Ferenczi Conference.

2 As this is one of the most important letters of the whole correspondence, let us at least take a look at its central sentences:

I was longing for personal, uninhibited, cheerful companionship with you [Ferenczi wrote to Freud] … and felt – perhaps unjustifiably – forced back into the infantile role. To be sure, I did, perhaps, have an exaggerated idea of companionship between two men who tell each other the truth unrelentingly, sacrificing all consideration. Just as in my relationship with Frau G. I strive for absolute mutual openness, in the same manner – and with even more justification – I believed that this, apparently cruel but in the end only useful, clear-as-day openness, which conceals nothing, could be possible in the relations between two psy.-minded people who can really understand everything and, instead of making value judgements, can seek the determinants of their psa. impulses. (Letter 170; Vol.1, pp. 217–218; italics are in the original)

3 In this particularly original and significant contribution we already find themes, preoccupations, and considerations that will accompany Ferenczi for the rest of his life, including his conflict with Freud and the crisis of their relationship documented in the Clinical diary. See also how Carlo Bonomi dealt with this in his 2010 article “Ferenczi and ego psychology.”

4 This is particularly true not only for the relational orientation pioneered by Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000), as Madelaine Miller-Bottome and Jeremy Safran wrote in 2018:

Ferenczi and Rank’s work was a clear precursor of later developments that have become central to the relational orientation: the concept and value of enactment (Jacobs, 1986), and more broadly the therapeutic value of non-interpretative interventions and the curative potential of implicit experience in the analytic relationship (Rachmann, 2010; Stern et al., 1998). (Miller-Bottome & Safran, 2018, p. 228)

5 As far as the first concept is concerned, a first trace of it can be found in the analytic work that Ferenczi undertook with Eugenia Sokolnicka (1884–1934; a Polish medical doctor and later pioneer of psychoanalysis in France), about which he wrote to Freud on June 4, 1920:

Connecting with my experiments with ‘activity’, I advised her to give up masturbation … But she seems to have been inwardly enraged by this intervention … she began to analyze me … and from now on suspected everything, no matter what I did … In spite of this I remained steadfast and hope that in the meantime we will be able to continue working. (Letter 847; Vol. 3, pp. 24–25).

As far as the trauma concept is concerned, a first clear and detailed new formulation of it is what we can find in Ferenczi’s letter to Freud of December 25, 1929. Here are his considerations on it:

Summarized most succinctly, I can share with you approximately the following:

1. In all cases in which I penetrated deeply enough, I found the traumatic-hysterical basis for the illness.

2. Where I and the patient succeeded in this, the therapeutic effect was much more significant. In many cases I had to call in already “cured” patients for follow-up treatment.

3. The critical view that gradually formed in me in the process was that psychoanalysis engages much too one-sidedly in obsessional neurosis and character analysis, i.e., ego psychology, neglecting the organic-hysterical basis for the analysis; the cause lies in the overestimation of fantasy — and the underestimation of traumatic reality in pathogenesis. I don't know if you can term that an “oppositional direction.” I don't think that it is justified. It is only a matter of a tendency, based on experience, to even out a one-sidedness, to the development of which no field of knowledge is immune. I, too, can confirm almost everything that modern ego psychology has brought about; these studies have uncommonly facilitated and advanced the understanding of pathological processes; but I do not place these investigations, which I myself take up in every case, so very much in the center of theoretical and technical interest.

4. The newly acquired (although they do essentially sooner hark back to old things) experiences naturally also have an effect on details of technique. Certain all too harsh measures must be relaxed, without completely losing sight of the didactic secondary intention. (Letter 1173; Vol. 3, pp. 376; italics in the original.)

6 In the paper he presented at the International Sándor Ferenczi Conference organized in Madrid in 1998 by Luís Martín Cabré, Franco Borgogno (1999) showed the central position of Ferenczi’s 1928 paper in his overall scientific evolution.

7 Padro Boschán (1939–2011; Boschán, 2004) dealt with this short but very important paper of Ferenczi’s at the International Sándor Ferenczi Conference organized in Turin in 2002 by Franco Borgogno.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Conci

Marco Conci, MD, has been a member of the editorial board of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis since 1994 and its coeditor-in-chief since June 2007. He is the author of Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis (International Psychoanalytic Books, 2019).