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Following a session in which I had cried with a patient, I reflected on Irwin Hoffman's (2009) constructivist critique of clinical detachment on the part of a therapist. In that helpful paper, Hoffman considers the problem of normative detachment as stemming from a taboo on influence that is linked to the incest taboo. Hoffman adds that a fear based, avoidant detachment loses the generative possibilities found in a loving attitude and as such may foster a deadly collusion as opposed to inspiring the sort of change that allows dissociation and enactment to diminish (cf., Stern, 2010). The sense that a personal, uncertain, and heartfelt presence is central to the texture of treatment is also at the heart of Carlo Bonomi's The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Volume II: Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. It is to Bonomi's credit that he weaves such clinical wisdom and technical consideration into a work that simultaneously stands on its own in advancing historical psychoanalytic scholarship.
Got them hesitation blues
Bonomi maintains that recognizing actual trauma remains taboo in our field, and by extension addresses the manner in which Sándor Ferenczi was ostracized for his attempt to return attention to actual trauma. As discussed in my review (Rothschild, 2017) of Bonomi's first volume (Bonomi, 2015) that focuses on Emma Eckstein and Freud's Irma injection dream, actual trauma centers on female castration as a terrified response to childhood sexuality. In Bonomi's focus on Ferenczi in Volume II, we find Erich Fromm defending Ferenczi's and Otto Rank's sanity against Ernest Jones accusations alongside Freud's reactivity to Princess Marie Bonaparte's awareness of traumatic discontents. The material is a lot to take in not only on account of its vastness, but due to the emotional difficulty found in following Bonomi's continued use of Ferenczi's (1933) confusion of tongues as a method to address the logic of enactment in encounters with traumatic material relatin