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This remarkable interdisciplinary dialogue on Ferenczi, embracing three scholars dispersed between London, Stockholm and Munich, evolved virtually and experimentally as a way of mentally surviving “another pandemic winter.” As such, its form – an essay by each author, interleaved with commentaries from the other two – mimics a key concern of the book. Like the mind of the Ferenczian survivor of trauma, it is itself a conversation between fragments seeking “forms of survival beyond restorative illusions” (p. 3).
From multiple and shifting vantage points (social science, literary critique, political history, biology and clinical practice are all invoked in ways that remain dialogical and “tentacular”) they address Ferenczi through specific scenes that rework our understanding of the foundation and implementation of psychoanalysis, historically, politically, and epistemologically. Staberg moves backwards in time from Freud and Ferenczi's “missed” final encounter in 1932, at which Ferenczi read out the draft of his “Confusion of Tongues” (1933) paper, to sketch a new genealogy of the psychoanalytic movement – one told not in terms of (Freudian) origins, science and authority, but as a question of intensities, erotic transference, the potentialities of milieu, the dismantling of the father image, and the “atmospheres” of their dreams in which masculinity, maternity and reproduction are queered. Willner focuses on an earlier “scene” in which Ferenczi, stationed in the Hungarian town of Pápa at the opening of the First World War, enters a conversation with Freud through which each will elaborate bioanalytical speculations. These, rather than providing psychoanalysis with natural scientific foundations, deconstruct evolutionary assumptions, reforming them on the basis of the psychoanalytic clinic of hysteria and the temporalization of symptoms and fantasies. Soreanu, in “Catastrophe and the Creativity of Fragments,” (pp. 145-192) is concerned with the experience of trauma it