Sandor Ferenczi Research Articles

Death as rupture, mourning as repair: A relational rendering of grief.

This paper honors Jeremy Safran's legacy of scholarship and pedagogy through the lens of his emphasis on rupture and repair. Challenging a Freudian rendering of mourning as ultimately giving up a lost object, the author draws on Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's application of Sandor Ferenczi's concept of introjection to offer a relational rendering of the grieving process.

The Relevance of Ferenczi in the Integrated Model of Brief Psychotherapy

This paper presents Sandor Ferenczi’s contributions to Short-Term Psychotherapy in general, specifically concretized in the Integrated ShortTerm Psychotherapy Model that has been developed at the SPPB (Portuguese Society of Brief Psichotherapy). Ferenczi’s proposal for the active participation of the therapist allows for a reformulation of the analytic framework, preventing the development of transfer neurosis and prioritizing the therapeutic relationship. The changes experienced and introduced by Ferenczi led to shifts in therapeutic work that remain relevant even today. We refer to the brevity of the therapeutic process, the focus on clients' needs, the interaction between patient and analyst, and the constant search for modifications to technique as ways to overcome therapeutic impasses and address patients' needs. The resonance of his clinical work is particularly evident in the therapeutic interventions, notably in the construction and development of the Therapeutic Alliance (TA). In summary, Ferenczi introduced a new level of therapeutic engagement within the inter-personal/inter-human sphere, relating to ethical issues and implications for the therapist’s personal requirements and training.

Sandor Ferenczi's concept of the dialogue of unconsciouses: a clinical example.

There is no doubt that Sandor Ferenczi is one of the principal giants in the early development of psychoanalysis. While much of his work has not been given the credit it deserves, in recent times there has been a revival of his concepts and way of doing analysis as a route to understanding relational work today. One of Sandor Ferenczi's unique psychoanalytical concepts is the dialogue of unconsciouses. This concept is defined as the process when patient and analyst connect to each other, and a psychic process begins to form between the two unconsciouses. This idea of a dialogue between the two unconsciouses arose from his novel experiments with mutual analysis and advocating for a new kind of relationship. He further described the dialogue of the unconsciouses as a way of being with the patient and that if this dialogue is investigated within the therapy, in service of understanding the patient's life experiences and transference, the potential for change and transformation is possible. In this context, Ferenczi assumed that if careful and focused attention is paid to the dialogue of the unconsciouses, it could reveal for the patient unknown aspects about himself but also unknown aspects about his analyst. In this way, the patient may know more about the analyst than the analyst knows. The clinical implication is that the dialogue of the unconsciouses invites both participants to authentically engage with each other in a way that something new about self-other could potentially arise that was previously unconscious but emerged from within the interplay of both unconsciouses. While not much has been developed in recent years on the topic of the dialogue of the unconsciouses, especially with the use of clinical examples, this paper's main contribution is to i) acknowledge the work of Ferenczi by revisiting this concept, ii) discussing the clinical implications of the concept so that the potential for the client's personal development is brought into focus, as well as iii) presenting a clinical example to illustrate the concept because such examples are few.

Traumatic Childhood and Adult Personality in Michaelides’ The Silent Patient

The objective of this study is to explore Alex Michaelides’ novel The Silent Patient (2019) to evaluate the representation of impact of childhood abuse on young adults’ personalities in general and the main character i.e. Alicia in particular. This research is qualitative and it analyzes the text in the light of Sandor Ferenczi’s theory of trauma and Sigmund Freud’s personality theory. Moreover, textual analysis is used as a research method to keenly analyze words, dialogues and conversations between the characters. The present study is significant as it combines psychological and fictional domains by analyzing the hazardous impact of childhood abuse on human adult personality. In conclusion, this study found that Alicia as an adult is focused more on the negative memories of childhood abuse. She fails to evolve as a positive person. This research ends with the recommendation for further analysis of other characters of the novel in the light of various psychoanalytic theories.

A confusion of tongues: Trauma, fantasy, and dissociation in Lacanian theory and the imperative for social change

Discussions of treatment and recovery from child sexual abuse often focus on the therapeutic aspects of speech and witness. Using concepts from Lacanian theory and from Sandor Ferenczi’s account of child sexual trauma, this article argues that speech and witness are not, in themselves, sufficient to facilitate recovery. While misogyny and violence are embedded within the available symbolic contexts within which survivors must attempt to recover, social and political change is needed to enable recovery for survivors of sexual abuse. Implications for recovery from other socially sanctioned traumas, such as racial trauma, are explored.

Игры бессознательного (по страницам переводов В.В. Старовойтова)

In recent years, several significant translations have been published by Vladimir Vasilyevich Starovoitov, which undoubtedly expand the ideas of Russian specialists about classical psychoanalysis, its criticism and the subsequent development of Freudian ideas. The article analyzes the works of John D. Sutherland, Ronald W.F. Fairbairn, Sandor Ferenczi and Benjamin Kilborne. An idea is given about the dynamically complex and contradictory process of the formation of psychoanalytic schools and individual teachings. The problems of the theory of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic technique are considered, the issues of applied and clinical psychoanalysis, the development of personality and the emotional world of a person are discussed.

Do black lives matter in psychoanalysis? Frantz Fanon as our most disputatious ancestor.

Each psychoanalytic tradition traces its lineage to an ancestor-Sigmund Freud as the father of psychoanalysis, Sandor Ferenczi as its once-lost mother, or Jacques Lacan as the prodigal son calling for a return to Freud. Drawing on these ancestors, a growing body of scholars has articulated psychoanalytic perspectives on race, class, sexuality, and gender in the consulting room and in society. These diverse authors-Black, White, and Brown-represent a turn in psychoanalysis that has yet to claim a primary ancestor, ambivalently inhabiting Freudian, Relational, and Lacanian theories as a secure base. In a world under siege by anti-Blackness and COVID-19-pandemics restricting the capacity to breathe for indigenous, immigrant, poor, and Black people-a global voice roars through masks that Black Lives Matter. Trapped between thin blue lines, overlapping pandemics, and the limitations of institute and graduate school training, this article is an outburst claiming Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary Black psychiatrist, as ancestor to this movement. Inspired by Edward Said's insight that Fanon is Freud's most disputatious heir, I will review his thinking as a decolonial psychoanalytic theorist through his classic works and his translated clinical papers. Tracing his psychoanalytic-specifically Lacanian and Ferenczian-influences, I will argue for Fanon's inclusion within the psychoanalytic canon and curriculum, and outline how his contributions are foundational to the decolonial turn. More urgently, I want to draw on Fanon to ask the following question: Do Black Lives Matter in psychoanalysis? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

The Development of Psychiatry in Slovakia

Around the turn of the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi were gaining international recognition for their seminal work in the new discipline of psychiatry in Austria-Hungary, progress in medicine and public healthcare were virtually non-existent in the Hungarian Highlands (Upper Hungary, Felvidék, Horná zem, the territory of today’s Slovakia). Owing to political conditions, scientific development of Slovak medical research and psychiatry began only from 1918 on. My paper should be understood as an introduction to Slovak public healthcare with a focus on psychiatry in the Central European political context during the years following the First World War.

Sergej M. Ejzenstejn, la psicologia e la psicoanalisi

Sergej M. Ejzenstejn was very much involved with psychology and psychoanalysis. He was an important friend of Lev Vygotskij, founder of cultural-historical psychology, and of Aleksandr Lurija, father of modern neuropsychological assessment: both Vygotskij and Lurija in the early 1920s were among the supporters of psychoanalysis in Russia and members of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society. In Ejzenstejn’s writings on film language we find psychological concepts of Vygotskij, such as agglutination and internal speech, that were present in the theory of film editing. As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, Ejzenstejn was very much interested in the concept of regression: the art lover, including the movie spectator, must regress and at the same time activate the most mature part of the psyche. Ejzenstejn was friend of Hanns Sachs and knew Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander, and Wilhelm Reich. In 1929 he gave a lecture at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In the USSR and in the USA he had two short experiences of psychoanalytic therapy.

Ferenczi e a educação

Experiências clínicas e postulados teóricos de Sandor Ferenczi trazem inúmeras contribuições para a Educação. Procuramos articular, neste artigo, duas formas de violência desmentida, uma coletiva e outra estranhamente familiar. Trata-se de duas dimensões fundadas num traumatismo radicalmente desestruturante, posto que resulta na clivagem do eu. Desenvolvemos a hipótese de que a desautorização do sujeito no plano societário - pela violência objetiva da exploração pelo capital - potencializa a identificação com o agressor e a reprodução de mecanismos incapacitantes na esfera educacional. O traumático da violência atuada entre os sujeitos na escola é sobreposto por uma clivagem introjetada na divisão de classes, especificamente na separação entre o ensino público e privado, bem como no racismo desmentido da sociedade brasileira. Introjeção e transferência fomentam esse processo. O embate entre os mundos adulto e infantil, com a imposição hierárquica de um saber vertical e hegemônico, costuma irromper como passagem ao ato no plano intersubjetivo. A imbricação inconsciente desses dois planos de violência clivada deve ser compreendida para que fragilidades narcísicas venham a ser integradas empaticamente no sentir com o outro. A sensibilidade para uma transferência mútua permite ao professor expor corajosamente suas fragilidades diante da hipocrisia sistêmica, promovendo reconhecimento dos sujeitos mais vulneráveis.

Extinction and Thalassal Regression

This essay examines certain intersections between writing and extinction through an eco-deconstructive account of the psychoanalysis of water. Jacques Derrida has often drawn attention to the interplay between the sound ‘O,’ and ‘eau,’ in Maurice Blanchot's own proper name, as well as in his novels, récits and theoretical works; both the zero-degree of organic excitation towards which the death drive aims and the question of water. Sandor Ferenczi's notion of thalassal regression suggests that the desire to return to the tranquility of the maternal womb parallels a response to a traumatic prehistoric extinction event undergone by organic life once forced to abandon its aquatic existence. Through Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, however, one can double the imaginary of water along the axes of a personal death organic life defers and delays, and an impersonal extinction it cannot. Derrida's unpublished 1977 seminar on Blanchot's 1941 novel Thomas the Obscure, however, allows us to imagine an exteriority to extinction, the possibility

Trauma, fragmentation and narrative: Sandor Ferenczi's relevance for psychoanalytical perspectives on our response to climate change and environmental destruction

AbstractPsychoanalytical perspectives on our responses to climate change and environmental destruction may be said to have begun with Harold Searles in 1972 and have gathered pace in recent years. All these explorations have in common a reliance on a set of conceptual ideas that were initially developed by Sandor Ferenczi, although he is rarely credited. Fully acknowledging of the extent of environmental destruction and climate change is seen as traumatic in these writings, and therefore, concepts that have been developed in working with patients traumatized by abuse have been found essential in trying to understand and describe our responses. This paper will show how Ferenczi's thinking about trauma and about the therapeutic relationship has influenced recent suggestions as to how a psychoanalytical perspective may help us to explore attitudes and beliefs and help others to fully acknowledge the seriousness of climate change and so change damaging behaviors.

From relation to the field: Modes of unconscious fantasy elaborations

Relational and field theories have much in common, despite divergent foundations. In this paper, several areas of divergence are selected, including the structure of the field as a relational matrix or as an unconscious joint fantasy of the couple; the fate and form of insight; and the nature of the unconscious as relational or ubiquitous. Differences in cognitive and attentional sets are identified and linked to different modes of insight. Using a clinical vignette, these divergences will be illustrated with an attempt to compare and contrast the two approaches through a discussion of how each lens highlights, expands, or forecloses different features of the analytic process. A mode of conceiving the unconscious as unstructured and multiple in potential is offered to reconcile divergent assumptions in therapeutic action. A consideration of Sandor Ferenczi’s clinical emphasis on relaxed technique, elasticity, and especially mutuality suggests that he would have been a field theorist were he among us today.

Para além da interpretação: repensando os enquadres e a escuta na psicanálise com crianças

A problemática que envolve a homogeneidade da clínica psicanalítica tem ganhado cada vez mais espaço nas pesquisas contemporâneas. Conduzir o setting de maneira rígida e ortodoxa pode ser um risco de alienação para o analista e também para o paciente. Apresentarei, aqui, um caso clínico de um tratamento infantil guiado por meio dos conceitos de técnica elástica de Sándor Ferenczi e da importância do brincar de Winnicott. Os comentários finais direcionarão o leitor para uma possível reflexão a respeito dos manejos e enquadres, propondo um convite para repensar a clínica contemporânea.

The Psychoanalytic Languages: On the Intimate Rivalry of Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott

This article presents and discusses a two-decades-long correspondence between Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott. Alongside closeness and friendship, the letters reveal tensions, disagreement and even rivalry between these two figures on three main levels: personal, cultural and theoretical. The debate can be framed around the question of whether or not the British School of psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1950s – and in which Winnicott and Balint were arguably the most senior figures – was a continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition that developed before World War II by Sandor Ferenczi and the Budapest School. The article argues, however, that there is another meta-theoretical level to the debate between the two: they passionately try to define what psychoanalytic language is, and disagree about its real nature.

Jeremy David Safran (1952–2018).

Present an obituary for Jeremy David Safran (1952-2018). In 1993, Safran became full professor and director of clinical training at the New School for Social Research. At the New School, he developed the program with an affiliation to Beth Israel Medical Center, where he was a principal consultant on a psychotherapy research program founded by Arnold Winston and directed by me. In 2001, Jeremy completed psychoanalytic training at the New York University Postdoctoral Program. Subsequently, he cofounded (with Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris) the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School, became president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and served as associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Jeremy's efforts and collaborations regarding emotion and interpersonal process laid the foundation for our own collaboration regarding ruptures in the therapeutic alliance. Our aim was to promote a "second generation" of alliance research that went beyond demonstrating its predictive validity and could be applied across treatment orientations to redress failure rates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Volume II: Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, by Carlo Bonomi, Routledge, London & New York, 2018, 285pp.

The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Volume II: Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, by Carlo Bonomi, Routledge, London & New York, 2018, 285pp.

“Identifying with the aggressor”: From the authoritarian to neoliberal personality

This chapter seeks to provide a preliminary reconstruction of the concept of the “Authoritarian Personality”, which Theodor W. Adorno developed in collaboration with Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, to try to understand the latent potential for fascism in the United States in the post-war period culminating in the eponymously titled volume published in the “Studies in Prejudice” Series. In contrast with the burgeoning contributions to the direct and largely uncritical appropriation and application of the concept in connection with the rise of the far-right, symbolized by Donald J. Trump, the current chapter urges some caution. More specifically, it argues that some of its key sociological and psychological assumptions need to be rethought. The concept of state capitalism needs to be supplanted with an analysis of neoliberalism. Moreover, the oedipal premises of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis must be supplanted by a more dialogical and relational conception of the “identification with the aggressor” drawn from the work of Sandor Ferenczi.

SOBRE A TÉCNICA ATIVA DE SÁNDOR FERENCZI

O presente trabalho objetiva o esclarecimento e a exposição da chamada técnica ativa de Sándor Ferenczi, psicanalista húngaro e discípulo contemporâneo de Freud, cuja obra foi considerada polêmica e permaneceu, durante anos, esquecida pelo público psicanalítico, já que Ferenczi sofreu duras críticas por Sigmund Freud. Para realizar a proposta, este artigo acompanha o desenvolvimento da teoria de Ferenczi sobre a técnica ativa, através de seus artigos e comunicações a respeito dessa proposta técnica inovadora. Com isto, pretende-se retomar a palavra deste importantíssimo pioneiro da psicanálise e considerar suas contribuições para a análise atual das patologias narcísicas, que apresentam novos desafios para o psicanalista atuante na clínica.

Psychoanalysis for a new humanism: Embodied testimony, connectedness, memory and forgiveness for a “persistence of the human”

In proposing a refounding of psychoanalysis within a humanist perspective, the author suggests a comparison between Elie Wiesel’s discussion of concepts such as witnessing, testimony, and memory as redemption, and Sandor Ferenczi’s idea of the therapist as “benevolent and useful witness,” who, thanks to his/her true empathic and committed participation, in contrast to Freud’s neutrality, enables the patient to achieve real awareness of the split parts within him- or herself, as well as an integration of the fragmentation due to trauma. Against “indifference,” the practice of connectedness, responsibility, memory, love, and forgiveness as true elaboration of trauma and “going beyond” are proposed as tools towards a “persistence of the human” in a world of increasing dehumanization.