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Readers of Bonomi's two volumes of The cut and the building of psychoanalysis (2015, 2018) will be familiar with the main tenets of his thesis. He describes an intuition he experienced in 1992 when studying a dream of Ferenczi's.
The timing of the dream was significant; it is reported in the same letter in which the dreamer, Ferenczi, proposes the beginning of his analysis with Freud. The dream centers around “a small penis, cut off and horribly flayed” (p. 2). Bonomi's intuition, a question that he set about answering over the thirty years that followed, is that a real trauma was seeking expression in all the formations that flowed from it.
Ferenczi, he points out, came to believe that a second trauma often occurred following a first. The second trauma being the failure of a benevolent witness, a parent or analyst, to correctly bear witness to the trauma and its effects. Ferenczi called this a disavowal and through his own work he came to understand that, when a patient came to analysis for help or comfort, the key factor at the beginning of coming to terms with trauma was to be believed in the first instance. To be believed but, more importantly, that the analyst understands and can demonstrate their understanding of the nature and effects of that trauma. Even the relational aspects of the trauma let alone the actual traumatic event are key in this regard.
Bonomi goes on to outline the steps he took to research his intuition: to either prove or disprove it. His researches took him to Germany in the first instance to learn more about Freud's time there working, for ten years, as a pediatrician. This fact is little known within the biographical accounts of Freud's life or in the myths we have all read about the founding of our discipline. Why was this? Bonomi asks.
Ferenczi's dream pointed to the possibility that a real trauma lay hidden within the stories that came to be written about this period. Bonomi's attention turned quickly to the widespread practice in Germany