Welcome to PEP Web! Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web. If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems. If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator. Username: Password: Can't remember your username and/or password? If you have forgotten your username and/or password please click here and log in to the PaDS database. Once there you need to fill in your email address (this must be the email address that PEP has on record for you) and click "Send." Your username and password will be sent to this email address within a few minutes. If this does not work for you please contact your group organizer. Athens user? Login here. Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.

(1949). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30:225-230

Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child—(The Language of Tenderness and of Passion)

Sándor Ferenczi

It was a mistake to try to confine the all too wide theme of the exogenous origin of character formations and neuroses within a Congress paper. I shall, therefore, content myself with a short extract from what I would have had to say on that subject. Perhaps it will be best if I start by telling you how I have come to the problem expressed in the title of this paper. In the address given to the Viennese Psycho-Analytic Society on the occasion of Professor Freud's seventy-fifth birthday, I reported on a regression in technique (and partly also in the theory) of the neuroses to which I was forced by certain bad or incomplete results with my patients. By that I mean the recent, more emphatic stress on the traumatic factors in the pathogenesis of the neuroses which had been unjustly neglected in recent years. Insufficiently deep exploration of the exogenous factor leads to the danger of resorting prematurely to explanations—often too facile explanations—in terms of 'disp

[This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.]