Sándor Ferenczi

The earliest account of how Ferenczi came to psychoanalysis is Freud's own, in his tribute for Ferenczi's fiftieth birthday⁵, printed in 1923 in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse over the signature of the editors. A few years after The Interpretation of Dreams appeared, Freud writes, a young doctor in Budapest who worked as a neurologist, a psychiatrist and an expert witness in the courts read the book and soon threw it aside, "es ist nicht bekannt, ob mehr gelangweilt oder angewidert" (it is not known whether more bored or repelled). Some time later he was drawn to Zurich, and from there he went to Vienna to meet the book's author. So began a friendship that Freud, in 1923, called long, intimate and still untroubled.

In 1909 Ferenczi travelled with Freud to the United States for the lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he appears in the group photograph of the conference's participants with Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Jones.

Freud's tribute also sketches his character in psychoanalytic terms. As a middle child among many siblings, Ferenczi had had to contend with a strong brother complex. Analysis, in Freud's words, had made of him "ein tadelloser älterer Bruder, ein gütiger Erzieher und Förderer junger Talente" (a faultless elder brother, a kindly educator and promoter of young talent).

Ferenczi was himself analysed by Freud, in two brief periods in 1914 and 1916. By then he had analysands of his own. In 1913 he analysed Ernest Jones, a treatment that Jones, in his life of Freud⁶, described as perhaps the first analysis an analyst undertook for his own sake, before training analysis existed.

In Freud's account Ferenczi was among the chief organisers of the psychoanalytic movement. At its second congress, at Nuremberg in 1910, he proposed the founding of the International Psychoanalytical Association, which was to defend analysis "gegen die Ächtung der Analyse durch die offizielle Medizin" (against its outlawing by official medicine). In 1912, as Jones tells it in his biography of Freud, Jones proposed a secret Committee of loyal followers to guard the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, and Ferenczi was among its founding members.

On 19 May 1913 Ferenczi founded the Budapest local group, with himself as chairman, Radó as secretary, and Hollós, Ignotus and Lévy as members. By 1923 he had led it for ten years. At the fifth congress, held in Budapest in September 1918, he was elected president of the International Association, with Anton von Freund as secretary. Freud wrote that, but for the political and personal catastrophes that followed, Budapest might have become the psychoanalytic capital of Europe. In October 1919, citing Hungary's isolation, Ferenczi resigned the presidency and handed it to Jones in London, and Freund fell ill and died in January 1920. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic Ferenczi lectured at the university, where, Freud reports, students crowded to hear him.

In the summer of 1922 he and Rank began the conversations from which The Development of Psychoanalysis grew. At the Berlin congress of September 1922 Freud set a prize question on how analytic technique and theory had influenced each other. The two authors adapted their text to it but withdrew from the competition. The book appeared in 1924, the same year as Rank's The Trauma of Birth⁷. According to E. James Lieberman's biography of Rank, Acts of Will⁸, Karl Abraham led the inner circle's opposition to both books.

Ferenczi's reach extended to America. When he lectured in New York in 1926, Harry Stack Sullivan heard him. Sullivan then urged Clara Thompson to be analysed by Ferenczi so that the two of them could learn his technique. Thompson went to Budapest for analysis with him, first in the summers from 1928 and then without interruption until his death in 1933. Thompson was also Sullivan's analyst, as Helen Swick Perry records in her biography of Sullivan, Psychiatrist of America⁹.

In Budapest Michael Balint became Ferenczi's pupil and his successor at the psychoanalytic polyclinic. After Ferenczi's death Balint was his literary executor, and he transcribed and translated Ferenczi's Clinical Diary. Balint also watched at close range the "grand experiment" of Ferenczi's last years, in which Ferenczi tried to meet one patient's every need.

Introjektion und Übertragung appeared in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1909, and as an offprint the following year. Ferenczi starts from the neurotic's readiness to transfer. He treats transference not as a peculiarity of the analytic situation but as a general neurotic mechanism and a special case of displacement, and the physician as no more than a catalyst for affects that are already present. Where the paranoiac expels what is unbearable onto the outside world, the neurotic draws as much of that world as possible into himself. Ferenczi named this process with a coinage: "Diesen Prozeß könnte man, im Gegensatze zur Projektion, Introjektion nennen" (this process might be called, in contrast to projection, introjection). A single sentence states the contrast: "Der Psychoneurotiker leidet an Erweiterung, der Paranoische an Schrumpfung des Ichs" (the psychoneurotic suffers from an enlargement of the ego, the paranoiac from its shrinking).

The second part of the essay applies the same idea to hypnosis and suggestion. The hypnotist, Ferenczi argues, succeeds by reviving the love and fear the subject once felt for the parents. Accordingly he distinguishes a paternal hypnosis, worked through fear, from a maternal hypnosis, worked through love. Suggestion is the unconscious transfer of an infantile "Neigung zu blindem Glauben und kritiklosem Gehorsam" (inclination to blind belief and uncritical obedience). The pleasure taken in such obedience links it with masochism: "Masochismus aber ist lustvolles Gehorchen" (masochism, however, is pleasurable obedience). The term he coined here had a long career. Freud took introjection up for mourning and melancholia and for the formation of the superego from the introjected parents. In Klein's work the interplay of introjection and projection from the first months of life builds up the inner world of good and bad objects.

Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeitssinnes appeared in the first volume of the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1913. It starts from Freud's Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning¹⁰, in which the original pleasure principle gives way to adaptation to reality under the Reality principle. Ferenczi asks what becomes of the child's feeling of omnipotence in this passage. "Denn was ist Allmacht?" he asks (for what is omnipotence?), and answers that it is the feeling of having everything one wants, with nothing left to wish for.

Life in the womb is for Ferenczi the period of unconditional omnipotence. After birth comes a period of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence, to which he relates sleep as a return to the womb. Then come a period of omnipotence by means of magic gestures, an animistic period, which he connects with the origins of symbolism, and a period of magic thoughts and magic words. He groups the stages of omnipotence as stages of introjection, which give way to a stage of projection, the stage of reality proper. "Seinen Höhepunkt erlangt der Realitätssinn in der Wissenschaft" (the sense of reality reaches its height in science). The erotic life follows a parallel course: "Autoerotismus und Narzißmus sind also die Allmachtsstadien der Erotik" (autoerotism and narcissism are thus the omnipotence stages of erotism).

From this scheme Ferenczi draws a proposal about the choice of neurosis. Freud had held that it depends on the phase of ego and libido development at which the disposing inhibition occurred. Ferenczi suggests that the content of a neurosis's wishes depends on the phase of libido at the point of fixation, while its mechanism depends on the stage reached by the sense of reality. Hysterical conversion belongs to the stage of magic gestures. The obsessional patient's conviction of the omnipotence of his thoughts, feelings and wishes belongs to the stage of magic thoughts and words. Paranoia belongs to the stage of projection. A footnote records that the essay was finished before Ferenczi could take into account Freud's paper on animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts in Imago.

In The Development of Psychoanalysis, Ferenczi wrote the historical and critical part and Rank the section on the analytic situation, and the two revised the whole together. Ferenczi's part reviews techniques that had stalled at earlier stages of psychoanalytic knowledge. Among them are the collecting of associations, the dictionary-like translation of symbols, symptom analysis, "complex analysis", lecturing patients on theory, and calling every stall a resistance. He rejects both rigid passivity and "wild activity". He names the analyst's own narcissism as a source of error. And he argues that the unconscious proper, which was never experienced, can be relived only piece by piece in the present, as a "fractionated catharsis".

Together the authors give repetition priority over remembering, reversing the weighting of Freud's Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through¹¹ and building on the Repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle¹². What was never conscious can only be repeated in the relation to the analyst, so repetition, and with it Acting out in the treatment, is to be allowed and then turned into present memory. Free associations, on this view, only show where and how deep the operative affects lie. The authors see psychoanalysis passing from a phase of knowledge (Erkenntnisphase) to a phase of experience (Erlebnisphase). They hold that a training analysis should not differ from a therapeutic one. And they foresee psychoanalytic knowledge becoming common to all physicians and to therapists who are not physicians.

Freud's tribute of 1923 already counted among Ferenczi's recent work his first steps toward an "aktive" therapy. In his last years, according to Balint's The Basic Fault¹³, Ferenczi went on to try to meet one patient's every need. Balint treats this "grand experiment" as a cautionary case. He reads the disagreement between Freud and Ferenczi through his own distinction between kinds of regression: Freud generalised from malignant cases, Ferenczi from benign ones.

Freud closed his tribute of 1923 with a reservation and a wish. Ferenczi's friends knew, he wrote, "daß Ferenczi noch mehr für sich behalten hat, als er sich mitzuteilen entschließen konnte" (that Ferenczi had kept still more to himself than he could bring himself to communicate). Freud wished him the mood, strength and leisure to carry out his plans in new work.

Jones's biography of Freud, for decades the standard life, attributed the dissolution of the Committee and the departures of Rank and Ferenczi chiefly to their failing mental health. Later critics, among them Erich Fromm, objected to its portrayal of Rank and Ferenczi as mentally disturbed. Fromm's sympathy went further. From his essay of 1935 on the social determination of psychoanalytic therapy onward, he sided with Ferenczi's call for an analyst who offers the patient warmth and unconditional affirmation, against what he saw as Freud's patricentric reserve.

The most direct continuation of Ferenczi's work came from the Budapest school. In Das Endziel der psychoanalytischen Behandlung¹⁴ (1935), Balint counts the full reliving of the Oedipal relation, as proposed by Ferenczi and Rank, among the "romantic" definitions of the goal of treatment, which he finds too general or too narrow. Yet to explain the New beginning he observed near the end of analyses, he turns to Ferenczi's theory of the erotic sense of reality. On that basis he argues that every drive is bound to an object from the first and has a passive aim, to be loved and satisfied.

In Frühe Entwicklungsstadien des Ichs. Primäre Objektliebe¹⁵ (1937), Balint presents the Budapest group of Alice Balint, Imre Hermann and himself as working in Ferenczi's line. The group treats the recurring formal features of the analytic situation as transference and as traces of the earliest experiences. From this work Balint draws the concept of primary object love, against the hypothesis of primary narcissism. In The Basic Fault (1968) he returns to Ferenczi once more, both as the author of the cautionary experiment and as the analyst who generalised from benign regression.

Ferenczi's analysands and listeners spread his influence well beyond Budapest. Klein began her analysis with him in Budapest in 1914. Margaret Mahler first met psychoanalysis as a schoolgirl in Budapest through Ferenczi and his circle. René Spitz attended his lectures as a young man and went to Freud for analysis at his urging. In America, Sullivan's response to the lectures of 1926 and Thompson's years in Budapest carried his technique into the circle around Sullivan.

Freud's tribute of 1923 surveys the writings of Ferenczi's first fifteen years in psychoanalysis. The clinical papers include "Ein kleiner Hahnemann" and the reports from analytic practice. Among the critical writings are reviews of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido and of Régis and Hesnard, and polemics with Eugen Bleuler on the alcohol question and with Putnam on psychoanalysis and philosophy. The theoretical papers include Introjektion und Übertragung² (1909), the theory of hypnosis, Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeitssinnes³ (1913) and the papers on symbolism. Later came the writings on the war neuroses, Hysterie und Pathoneurosen (1919), and a study of paralytic mental disorder written with Hollós.

Jones translated a selection of his papers as Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (1916), and his Populäre Vorträge über Psychoanalyse appeared in 1922 as the thirteenth volume of the Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek. With Rank he wrote Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse⁴ (1924; in English, The Development of Psychoanalysis, 1925). His collected papers began to appear in German as Bausteine zur Psychoanalyse in 1927, in volumes on theory and on practice. His Clinical Diary of his last years was transcribed and translated by Balint, his literary executor.