Fostering Tolerance and Creativity in the Culture of Psychoanalysis

One has to allow for a certain multiplicity of views, even an alloy with such-and-such percent nonsense.

The internal politics of analysis, as well as the polis as a sphere of analytic investigation, is neglected and spoken of less frequently than sexuality in psychoanalysis. For example, inquiry into the political nature of the reception of innovative analytic ideas, the choice of analytic curriculums, and the appointment of training analysts seems to receive insufficient attention in psychoanalysis. Is the “political” rather than sexuality now the unconscious of psychoanalysis?

One important aspect of the political unconscious of psychoanalysis that has not been adequately explored is the impact on psychoanalysis in general of the Secret Committee's treatment of Sandor Ferenczi. In this article I examine several implications of this event and its subsequent impact on psychoanalysis as a culture. I shall attempt to demonstrate that whereas psychoanalysis could have been a facilitative environment for constructive dissent and creativity, a kind of Winnicottian potential space that fostered playing with inherited languages and theories, it has become leery, since Ferenczi was scapegoated and pathologized by Freud and the Secret Committee, of risk and innovation and permeated by intolerance of difference.

This article is divided into three sections. The first section, The Trauma to Psychoanalysis of the Scapegoating of Sandor Ferenczi, explores the impact on psychoanalysis as a culture of the Secret Committee members' treatment of Ferenczi. Offering a