You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Sandor Ferenczi is the Dionysus of psychoanalysis. Lest this description seem too pithy and too metaphorical, one should recall how Freud, with clairvoyance, anointed Ferenczi when he was chosen by the founding Father to be one of his six most trusted disciples. Members of the secret committee were each given a ring to mark their union with the mysterium tremendum of the psychoanalytic spirit. On May 25, 1913, Freud presented Ferenczi with a gold ring whose Graeco-Roman intaglio depicts Dionysus, phallus standing high and on two sides Maneads looking on —inspired, ecstatic, filled with awe. In that moment, the destiny of one who has been called the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis was sealed.
What is to be made of this identification, sponsored by Freud, of Ferenczi with the cross-dressing dying and rising Greek god of wine? Dionysus is a god, by the way, whose epiphanies are among the most complex in the ancient Greek religious imagination. The origin of this god is no doubt relevant to the position Ferenczi was to occupy, as origin sets the course but not the fate of destiny. When Dionysus' mother Semele was being consumed in flames, his Father, Zeus, pulled baby Dionysus from the fire. Zeus implanted his son into his own thigh where Dionysus was to mature and assume Zeus' divine nature. How Freud fantasized Ferenczi is narrated in this drama of paternal second-birth. His special place in Freud's generative bestowal as well as Ferenczi's own tragic wound and indestructible child-like spirit is condensed in the myth of Dionysus and its emblematic displacement. That Ferenczi, through his active techniques of solicitude and mutuality, would return, as in deferred action, with zeal to his first identifications with the mother is per