Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

ANDRE HAYNAL: Disappearing and Reviving: Sandor Ferenczi in the History of Psychoanalysis. Karnac (Books) Ltd., London UK/New York, 2002, 151 pp., $35.00, ISBN 1-85575-254-9. The author Andre Haynal has been one of the main translators and proponents of Ferenczi's work for the past 15 years, along with Michael Balint and John Gedo. He apparently was the supervisor for, and contributed to, the recently published correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi, Behind the Scenes. Freud in Correspondence. (Scandinavian University Press, 1997). This is a study of the history of psychoanalysis and its developments over the past century. His main thesis is that while Freud is the father of classical psychoanalysis, Ferenczi is the initiator of the development of theory and in contemporary psychoanalysis. Through the work of Michael Balint in the UK middle group and later Clara Thomson in the USA (interpersonal psychoanalysis) Ferenczi's ideas have blossomed following his death. Haynal's thesis is that while Stekel and Adler and Jung all left Freud and founded other schools of thought, Ferenczi was not a dissident in that sense and always considered himself part of mainstream psychoanalysis, even when Freud and he parted ways over his use of techniques and Ferenczi's concepts of co-transferences and the necessity for therapist disclosure, as well as the need for a listener, and the concept of what we now call an intersubjective third were all proposed as part of his developing concept for psychoanalysis in the 1920s. Because of his repeated boundary violations, tempestuous marriage, and love/hate personal and therapeutic relationship with Freud, his many contributions were overlooked for years by authors who portrayed him as unbalanced or ill during the later part of his life. The fact that self psychology and relational analysts now champion his infant maternal dyadic attachment and supportive empathie concepts as being more significant than the oedipal transferences and their interpretation, has done much to revive recent interest in Ferenczi's original diaries and publications. Ferenczi being part of the original Freud inner circle, shared an interest in spiritualism, especially thought transfer and word associations with Freud, traumatic war neuroses with Abraham, and active and pre-oedipal primal anxieties with Rank. He advocated the use of new aimed at experiencing and empathy rather than the old Freudian that had rational insight as its goal. Being dissatisfied with the results of classical analysis and the central issue of transference interpretation, Ferenczi began to experiment with sharing his own associations, countertransferences, and history with his patients in experiments called mutual analyses. …