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The Chairman introduced the panel, commenting that the Freud-Ferenczi controversy raised many issues about the nature of communication between analyst and analysand, as illustrated by the rich papers being presented.
The first panellist, Axel Hoffer, indicated that in his presentation he would trace the evolution of Ferenczi's re-framing of Freud's conceptualisation of psychic reality. Hoffer noted that Freud had never wavered from his 1900 conceptualisation of psychic reality: ‘the unconscious is the true psychical reality … as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs’ (Freud, 1900, p. 613). Thus, for Freud, the contrast lay in the distinction between psychic reality as the unconscious and the external reality of the material world and historical time.
Ferenczi stressed the decisive importance of the analyst's feeling his way through empathy into the traumatised patient's psychic reality to reach the affective and historical truth necessary for cure. Thus, for Ferenczi, discovering the external reality of the trauma in the patient's life was critical. For Freud the primal fantasy was crucial because, as Hoffer noted, Freud believed in the actuality of prehistorical traumatic events, such as incest, parricide and castration. Freud displaced his belief in actual trauma backwards to prehistory. The trauma in the present derives from our universal inheritance of prehistoric traumatic memories in the form of unconscious fantasies. Hoffer underlined that the two men's disagreement thus regarded not whether the trauma happened, but when—ontogenetically or phylogenetically. For Freud, the extent to which trauma had actually occurred in the life of the individual was a matter of relative indifference. Ferenczi ultimately criticised this approach as insensitive and pedagogical.
Hoffer outlined that Freud and Ferenczi's views of psychic reality diverged regarding: (1) the time frame of the historical a