Threshold and Impasse: Excavating the Maternal Defense in Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary

Three dramatic conflicts emerge from Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary, when the Diary is analyzed as if it were a literary text. Using the interlocking symbols of the threshold and the impasse as an Ariadne's thread to guide us through the Diary's complexities, we can trace Ferenczi's journey to intense self-awareness in the penultimate year of his life. These three conflicts are (1) the conflict between Freud and Ferenczi, (2) the conflicts experienced by Ferenczi and his patients in his work in mutual analysis, and (3) Ferenczi's internal conflicts uncovered in the process of mutual analysis, resulting in his discovery of what I call “the maternal defense.” “The maternal defense” is an elaborate constellation, developed by Ferenczi over the course of his life to protect him from acknowledgment of his unconscious hatred and fear of women. Excavation of this defense created space ample enough to contain ambivalent feelings toward both women and Freud.

Traditionally, the threshold is a “symbol of transition and transcendence … the function of the threshold is clearly to symbolize both the reconciliation and the separation of the two worlds of the profane and the sacred (Cirlot, 1971, p. 341). Moreover, “The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible” (Eliade, 1959, p. 25). As in the threshold of a house, movement is both inside and out. An impasse, however, is “a passage open only at one end … a blind alley … a deadlock” (Webster's New World Dictionary). Clinically, “an impasse is an insidious arrest of the psychoanalytic process…. It is not the same as failure or interruption of treatment which usually can be traced to relatively obvious personal and recognizable faults in both the patient and the analyst…. It is complex and multidetermined and the countertransference is always