The Intruder

“Precocious ability is often nothing more than mimicry,” writes the art connoisseur Brian Sewell (2012) in his memoir, Outsider. This may often be so, but not always, and it certainly wasn’t true of Ferenczi: Mimicry is precisely what he was incapable of, and this may very well be one of the reasons for which Freud was so severe with him.

Role models are the problem; breaking away from them the task. True inventiveness alters what came before, as well as what will follow. Very few names in the history of psychoanalysis are associated with such inventiveness. I can think of four (and I don’t mean here to invite vacuous high gossip; others have certainly mattered but haven’t, I believe, determined analysts; consciousness to the same extent): Freud (of course), Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Lacan. So: how Ferenczi?

Long forgotten, he was in France, where I live and work, brought back to the fore by Wladimir Granoff, an analyst born in Strasbourg in 1924 in a family of Jewish Russian immigrants (they had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution). A man of vast culture, fluent in French, Russian, German, and English, he was close to Lacan (until 1964), as well as to the British Middle Group (especially to Winnicott and Masud Khan). It was thanks to Granoff’s efforts that the intruder was let in. Why did Granoff do this? To use the 19th-century historian Michelet’s words, he did this to give the present the new past it called for. And isn’t this, indeed, the very essence of analytical work: to shed new light on a wrinkled, ashen present, a light that can only come from the past, itself forever new? That is what dreams do: They reap all that is repressed during our waking hours. They speak the unspeakable. They weaken the fortified castle of identity and defenses. This is what Ferenczi did as of 1908, incessantly asking what should the analyst say and show, and how, and in what circumstances, of what goes on for him in the analyses he lets himself get involved in.

Ferenczi the in