Notes on “Confusion of Tongues” by S. Ferenczi

I admire his self-criticism. He [Ferenczi] saw that in his attempt to help his patients with their trauma head-on, he was in fact causing them considerable pain without a fundamental change in their condition. His well-intentioned efforts to deal consciously with their problem were being experienced by them as an assault. The difficulty of understanding the structurally damaged patient is made more so in that where once it may have seemed adequate for a therapist to have been analyzed right down to the rock bottom, it has now become necessary for the rock bottom rock itself to become known to them to help the patient. The changes in Ferenczi’s attitude toward his patients—a 180° change—revealing his flaws to them had to have been validated by him (I would like to think) by how he felt when he first began doing it. This willingness on his part to set aside preconceived concepts and ideas about analysis and become a mother to his child-patients must have cost him dearly, considering the time of day and the orthodoxy opposing it. Today it is the infant-patient who needs to be nurtured and understood.

In his casual matter of fact presentation of sexual abuse midway through the paper, what appears at face to be a presentation of an already accepted premise was in fact a bombshell. The opening shots aimed at a crime that is rapidly proving to be the scandal of our century.

When it comes to incest, I feel certain that there is no pathology in tenderness (itself), which Ferenczi links in a way to the erotic that somehow can become incestuous. Having never ever experienced tenderness from my mother until I was sixty, I protest his extrapolation of the infant’s need for the breast and the mother’s adaptation on primal grounds! Tenderness would no longer be considered tender when it becomes excited. (One is cool and the other is feverish.) The erotic is still not sexual. I believe there are clear demarcations in the mother–infant relationship. There is confusion here between ten