Discussion of Hayuta Gurevich's “The Language of Absence and the Language of Tenderness”1

I was very excited to read Hayuta Gurevich's paper, as I have long admired Ferenczi and his highly original and important contributions to psychoanalysis and have regretted the relative obscurity to which he has fallen — at least in this country. Hayuta mentioned early in her paper that she believes his work enriches our understanding of other psychoanalysts, whom I will refer to as “theorists of the self” — Balint, Winnicott, Kohut — members of the Interpersonal School. Indeed, Ferenczi's ideas laid the groundwork for theirs. He also had close relations with a number of these thinkers. Balint, for example, was his protégé and translator who emigrated from Budapest to England, where he became a prominent member of the Independent School. The American Clara Thompson was his analysand in the early 1930s and then went on with Harry Stack Sullivan to found the William Alanson White Institute.

So how do we explain the fact that Ferenczi has been largely written out of the official history of psychoanalysis, at least in Anglophone countries? Certainly it did not help that Jones (1957), in his biography of Freud, characterized Ferenczi as psychotic in the last years of his life, dismissing his later work as the ravings of a lunatic. Ferenczi's (1933/1988) last paper and arguably his most important, “Confusion of the Tongues,” was treated as a personal affront by Freud when Ferenczi read it to him en route to the International Psychoanalytic Conference in 1932. It was not published in English until 1949, 16 years after Ferenczi's death in 1933.

I don't think Ferenczi's invisibility is entirely the product of political infighting. From the very beginning of his career, Ferenczi took the environment — and, by extension, environmental failures — seriously. In some quarters, this emphasis has been understood as anti-psychoanalytic. The