The Suppression and Censorship of Ferenczi's Confusion of Tongues Paper

The Confusion of Tongues paper could have ushered in a new era in psychoanalysis when Ferenczi delivered it in 1932, but it caused such an enormous controversy that the message it conveyed was lost in the battle to deliver and publish it. In actuality, the controversy surrounding the Confusion of Tongues paper constitutes one of the darkest moments in the history of psychoanalysis. At the time Ferenczi presented these ideas, he wished to have them accepted by Freud and the analytic community and integrated into mainstream psychoanalysis. But he was always ambivalent about his deviations from Freud and never seemed to realize how far he had deviated and how much he represented the first dissident point of view in psychoanalysis (Gedo, 1987, personal communication; Rachman, 1989b, 1997; Thompson, 1944).

There are many reasons Ferenczi didn't realize how far he had departed from what had become, by 1932, traditional psychoanalysis. Ferenczi continued to experiment, expand his thinking, and develop ways to elasticize the psychoanalytic situation. But Freud and his conservative followers did not experiment. The inner circle, the Society of Rings, functioned to maintain the status quo. Although Ferenczi was a member of this inner circle, he was still a dissident (as was