Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

January 29, 1990. THE FREUD-FERENCZI RELATIONSHIP AND ITS BEARING ON CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS. Dr. André Haynal.

Dr. Haynal discussed the origins of some of our concepts in psychoanalysis. The common notion that everything in treatment is transference is not something one will find in Freud, despite Freud's emphasis on the transference. Ideas relative to countertransference that are important in the British, Swiss, and French schools, and hidden ideas of object relations and intersubjectivity, are also not found in Freud. What is the origin of these ideas? Dr. Haynal traced them back to the intimate relationship between Freud and Ferenczi. The early psychoanalytic pioneers did not make a sharp distinction between the private and personal, and the psychoanalytic. For example, Ferenczi fell in love with Elma Pálos, his analysand and the daughter of Gizella Pálos, then his mistress, later to be his wife. Ferenczi pressed Freud to help him with this crisis by briefly analyzing Elma. In 1909 Freud wrote to Jung urging him not to analyze his wife because of the problem of countertransference.

The early pioneers worked with the conviction that the analysis could be dissociated from the relationship. While Freud discovered the transference, he did not make explicit its limits, nor did he seem particularly enthusiastic about working with it. In a letter to Pfister in 1910, Freud said, "Transference is our cross to bear." He spoke of it often in his technical writings as the greatest difficulty in the treatment. Freud was especially uncomfortable with the maternal transference and worked with it only out of necessity. He was quite aware of countertransference, and in a 1909 letter to Jung he wrote about the importance of developing the thick skin we need to dominate "countertransference."

Ferenczi, like Freud, thought that with proper training, analysis could be uniform, irrespective of who the analyst was. Yet gradually, Ferenczi came to understand that this