Contemporary Reading of Winnicott's “Regression to Dependence” in the Language of Ferenczi1

Contemporary psychoanalysts are increasingly presented with patients whose difficulties and level of psychic functioning lie beyond neurosis. In these instances, the uncovering of organized but disguised or hidden conflicts, fantasies, wishes, and compromise formations is not curative. Rather, these patients need the analyst to actively create, construct, and strengthen their psychic functioning and structure.

I suggest that Ferenczi's and Winnicott's ideas about regression to dependence in analysis are fundamental contributions to these quests, and that Ferenczi laid the foundation, which Winnicott (among others, to whom I will not refer in this paper) further explored and developed. Continuing their line of thought through a contemporary reading, I will focus on the unfolding of the enactments of early traumas in the process of regression to dependence in analysis as “mutual dissociation.”

First, I will describe their clinical theories of treating early developmental trauma in the language of Ferenczi. Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) preceded D.W. Winnicott (1896-1976), and Winnicott, recognizing their remarkable resemblance, admits that he avoided reading Ferenczi because he couldn't tell his ideas from his own. Both assume that realization and experience of the authentic self shape the psyche, rendering it a sense of real and, consequently, that of differentiation and agency.

Both underscore the crucial requirement of adaptation of the environment to the realization of the self, and both regard as an axiom the complete dependence of the psyche on the environment at the initial stages. They emphasize the impact of the environmental “excessive failure” on the psyche as the main factor for early psychopathology (Ferenczi, 1955a, 1955c; Winnicott, 1962, 1965c). Embedded in and dependent upon external reality before the psyche develops its defenses, early traumas have unique