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In their essay ‘Why Psychoanalysis Has No History’, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Murray Schwartz make an important intervention into psychoanalytic history writing, by reminding us about the largely unacknowledged trauma history of psychoanalysis. The trauma history refers to two distinct phenomena. First, it refers to the migration of psychoanalysts before and during the Second World War, mostly to England and to the Americas, and to its deep consequences in terms of dislocation and communal fragmentation (Young-Bruehl & Schwartz, 2012, p. 140). Second, it refers to intellectual splits, quarrels and fragmentations internal to the field of psychoanalysis. At the intersection of these two forms of forgetfulness, what we are missing is a collective historical consciousness that can organize a set of disparate observations precisely as a trauma history, a reflection on ‘a repetitive pattern of splits and consequent distortions’ (Young-Bruehl & Schwartz, 2012, p. 142). Various voices have by now discussed the traumatic consequences of the split between Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi for our contemporary psychoanalytic imaginary (Bergmann, 1996; Brabant, 2003; Haynal, 1997, 2002; Martín-Cabré, 1997; Schneider, 1988). While these discussions are crucial for recovering Ferenczi's contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique, it is equally important to ‘thicken’ our accounts of his other dyads and collaborations. Among these, the collaboration with Elizabeth Severn has a privileged place, as she was one of his key patients and the protagonist of the Clinical Diary (1932) (the case of ‘R.N.’). Arnold W. Rachman, with his Elizabeth Severn: The ‘Evil Genius’ of Psychoanalysis, does the work of both illuminating the Ferenczi-Severn dyad (and their co-creations, including the experimentations with mutual analysis) and exploring Severn's own biography and her journeys before, during and after her analysis with Ferenczi. Rachman (2017, p. 57) refers to the forgetfulness a