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Axel Hoffer suggested, in 1993: “If Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the mother… psychoanalysis lost its mother … [and] thus became a one-parent child” (Hoffer, in Aron and Harris, 1993, p. 75). When I first quoted this moving metaphor, I felt obliged to add: “Now, it seems, mother is back for good” (Berman, 1996, p. 410).
Indeed, for a long time we have become accustomed to viewing psychoanalysis, and with it psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, as a single-parent family. Believing that we all sprang out of Freud's head, as Athena sprang out of the head of Zeus (an early pre-Christian version of immaculate conception), made many of our present concerns, ideas, and methods appear bastardly, rootless, representing mostly a negation. This view allowed orthodox authors to describe any trends that differed with Freud's views as “deviations” (Berman, 1997a).
On the other hand, if we reclaim Sándor Ferenczi as our missing “other voice,” we can experience psychoanalytic thought and treatment as evolving out of the dialogue of two voices; out of the “intercourse”—both loving and conflictual (personally and theoretically)—of “father” Freud and “mother” Ferenczi, as a true generative dyad (Berman, 1997a). This allows us to find anew a freeing, dialectical view of our present professional world.
Speaking of father and mother here is, of course, a bit conventional. “The indulgent mother” and “the stern father” are discussed by Ferenczi (1919, p. 186) in one of those passages—to be found also in Freud, and other authors of that period—which show the intrusion of social stereo types