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Talking again about ferenczi since opening the sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School University in 2008, we are struck by several matters. The work of this extraordinary thinker/researcher/analyst/clinician is still fresh and potent. And yet, Ferenczi is still too unknown to too many educated and thoughtful psychoanalysts. His work remains in need of fresh translation and requires an edited, annotated, more accessible edition. There is still no worthy
biography of this pioneer analyst.
We have a new and perhaps mournful reading of a comment of Balint, “The historic event of the disagreement between Freud and Ferenczi acted as a trauma on the psychoanalytic world” (1968, p. 152). At first encounter, one thinks of the loss to those of Ferenczi's followers who were left so adrift at his death. But, one must also think of the loss of a rich trauma theory to the entire field of psychoanalysis, a loss of great consequence to many adults and children who experienced actual abuse, whether physical, mental, or sexual. The denial of the reality of abuse was repeated at the level of the family, the analytic dyad, and the institution of psychoanalysis.
But most particularly, it has struck us that the loss that is most acute and palpable is the collapse of the possibility of dialogue. Dialogue across many points of difference. So we might think trauma and fantasy; intrapsychic and intersubjective; transference and countertransference; oedipal and pre-oedipal, analysand and analyst as subject and object; desire and attachment; father and mother. For more than 80 years, we have, too frequently, in psychoanalysis lurched between polarities, conducting our debates over theoretical and clinical difference as some horrid version of Grand Auto Theft, incinerating people we did or do not agree with; free to launch ad hominem or ad feminam arguments without a second thought. This polarizing and villainizing form of argumentation is a process that certainly does not solely involve Ferenc