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The current renaissance of interest in Ferenczi follows a period of a prolonged and painful silence about this pioneer of psychoanalysis. What is more, it was a silencing. In his new book, Elizabeth Severn: The “Evil Genius” of Psychoanalysis, Arnold William Rachman has dedicated many pages to the silencing of the innovative and original thinker Sándor Ferenczi. What Rachman calls a Todschweigen, the title of chapter 7, a death by silence (following the suggestion of Vienna trained psychoanalyst Esther Menaker), was a series of decade-long, brutal actions to suppress one of the most interesting voices in psychoanalysis.
Rachman takes us on a very personal journey through his own life. Starting with the laconic statement: “I did not come to psychoanalysis easily.” (p. 2), he presents his “difficult struggle to find a home in psychoanalysis” (p. 2). The motor of this struggle was the objective to discover “an analytic experience” based on “clinical empathy, responsiveness, flexibility, and creativity” (p. 6). On this path, Rachman was very often confronted with his own disappointment, anger, rage and pain as a result of being misunderstood. In supervision he suffered the trauma of “Confusion of Tongues”. The discovery of Ferenczi's work was a revelation, but also a shock: Back in the 1970s “no one had ever placed Ferenczi's name on a reference list or uttered it in class, supervision or a lecture” (p. 16, italics in the original).
Rachman's admiration for Ferenczi led him to a further discovery: of Ferenczi's famous patient Elizabeth Severn. Rachman shares Severn's conviction that compared with Freud, Ferenczi was the better psychoanalyst. In her interview with Kurt R. Eissler in 1952, Severn admitted: “I had chosen him [Ferenczi] because I thought he was more of a physician than Freud was … he [Ferenczi] was more interested in the patient …” (cited by Rachman on p. 167). Ferenczi's work with Severn is marked by mutual confidence, trust and affection - despite the patie