Ferenczi's “Feminine Principle”: A Feminine Version of the Death Drive

One of Ferenczi's most original contributions is his conception of femininity. Apart from the interesting intuitions in Thalassa and especially in “Male and Female,” his most important insights are found in a few passages of his Clinical Diary. While traumatic suffering is explored in his last writings in terms of the destructive effects of personality dissociation, fragmentation, and splitting, in the Diary femininity becomes the occasion for imagining a possible place of reconciliation, of the acceptance of unpleasure. This place, which does not exist in Freud's thought, is identified with a “feminine principle” that permeates nature. The capacity for suffering acceptance, and support, in contrast to the egoistic and masculine impulse to discharge tension, which is the pleasure principle, is the essential characteristic of that “feminine principle” which Ferenczi theorizes as something elemental and having the nature of a drive, but at the same time endowed with intelligence and associated with the reality principle. This drive element constitutes itself as the feminine version of death drive.