Achieving the Elasticity of Technique: Sándor Ferenczi's Psychoanalytic Project and Journey1

The “elasticity of technique” which Ferenczi proposed in his 1928 study of that title does not simply mark a particular phase in his psychoanalytic experimentation, nor can it be seen as his point of arrival (Ferenczi, S., 1928a). Those with an intimate knowledge of Ferenczi's thought will recognize it rather as a profound dimension of a general psychoanalytic attitude which gradually fermented and matured across his experience, coming to produce substantial changes in his theory and practice.

In this paper I intend to give a brief outline of the psychic conditions and values which constituted the foundation of this attitude, psychic conditions and values that have progressively made Ferenczi's contribution to psychoanalysis amazingly modern and appealing for new generations of psychoanalysts. They are the following: (1) the authority which he gained through his practical experience in the field; (2) his unqualified willingness to put himself on the line; (3) his special capacity for imaginative-elaborative identification with the patient's emotions and thoughts, and, in particular, with his legitimate needs and expectations (a capacity accompanied by compassion and respect). Ferenczi indicated these three characteristics, which could be broadly subsumed under the experience he called ‘feeling at one with’ (Einfühlung), as being idiosyncratically elective of ‘being a psychoanalyst’ to a community of colleagues who at the time were not yet fully ready to accept them and to really take them on board.

Elasticity did not mean for Ferenczi, as many still claimed (even Freud, in some way), indulgence and symmetry, but essentially the starting point for the analyst to acknowledge and

work-through his own influence and functions in the analytic process, his own limitations included. The implication – and this is the point I would like to stress – was a heightened responsibility and responsiveness of the analyst in his daily reception of the patient along with a greater awareness of the elements of subjectivity involved in his participation both in each session and in the ‘longer-term wave’ of an analysis. Every analysis in fact, even if it appears in the guise of a scientific method and professional routine, can itself – in his view – contribute to the repetitive and ‘massifying’ structuring of the encounter (Ferenczi, S., 1925, p. 271) through obedience to the un-reflected group basic assumptions linked to conformism and to an anti-developmental unconscious collusion.

Obviously, Ferenczi himself did not have a complete access to the tools required to attain this ideal; nonetheless the clinical issues inherent to his analytical position became clearer and clearer to him and, with time, to the majority of us.

The Project and its Debut

From the viewpoint I wish to adopt here, which principally sees elasticity of technique as a neverending journey in Ferenczi's life and work, the first steps towards the realization of this ideal are the observations contained in his pre-analytic writings, 1899-1908 (Mészáros, J., 1999). In these works, the young Ferenczi, who had not yet encountered Freud, anticipated and made explicit the values that became fundamental to his future therapeutic practice. He questioned the medicine and psychiatry of his day and denounced what he saw as aspects of knowledge and power that revealed its practitioners to be inherently conceited and lax in their care for patients and for patients' suffering. In other words, he denounced the fact that, in substance, practitioners could too easily lose sensitivity, solidarity and sincere interest in the pain and needs of their patients, which instead should have been at the centre of their attention and listening, and equally too easily and rapidly forget and conceal their mistakes and limits under a falsely superior and idealising stance, founded on a denial of ignorance and of the fallibility of one's own means, while these, if recognized and accepted, were for Ferenczi the privileged heuristic instruments to extend understanding and competence (see, as example and testimony of this epistemophilic and mental posture, his 1906 translation of a Letter from Dumas to A Young Person Who Wants To Become a Doctor [Lorin C., and Almassy, K., 1983], and his brief 1903 review Where memory sleeps).

Indeed, right from the start Ferenczi's critical work in the field of psychoanalysis had as its primary objective the challenge to the provisional and transient nature of knowledge, the misery of human attitudes, and the overestimation of one's own abilities and perspectives, a challenge quite explicit in the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence (Freud and Ferenczi, 1908-1933). Over the course of this correspondence, Ferenczi, through his rapport and dialogue with Freud (Haynal, A., 2001), bombarded his colleagues, Freud, and of course himself with an interminable series of questions that, so to speak, ‘put at issue’ the young and as yet uncertain basic psychoanalytic principles, but did so without any nihilism. He rather wanted to temper the noble fibre of the psychoanalytic method in order to better adapt it to the psychic lacks of patients and not to allow it to lapse in the face of difficulty into non-thought and fatalism.

To state the matter differently, Ferenczi put the ‘obvious’ ‘to work’, considering it as an important source of the dissociated and repressed unconscious. Among the ‘obviousnesses’ that were to come under his scrutiny were those dimensions, functions and mental operations that, insofar as they serve to ground psychic life and our understanding of it, themselves become automatic3 and for this reason are no longer observed, reflected on, discussed and mentioned. What Ferenczi essentially had in mind, in this regard, was those behaviours of a routine or ordinary nature which are generally deemed normal and granted, and even useful, while they may turn out to be quite the reverse. They may in fact harbour – as Ferenczi demonstrated (chiefly in his Clinical Diary, 1932b) – aspects of an abuse (of power) and a devious and subtle violence, which not rarely serve to mask a laziness, insensitivity, indifference and ambiguity that show little respect for either the patient or the psychoanalytic method itself.

In this connection, we should also recall at this point that Ferenczi's goal was to expand on Freud's concept of the unconscious, including in it that which never became mentally inscribed and that which remained unspoken in the patient's infancy and past, frequently on account of inadequate nurturing and education (Borgogno, F., 2002). To his mind, in short, the ‘obvious’ represented an area in which are deposited countless uncertainties, doubts, profound anxieties and

mysteries that the exploring mind cannot bear since these would be too disturbing if removed from the silence that envelops them – that realm of the unsaid often imposed, interdicted, and sanctioned by the community itself.

As soon as Ferenczi, the ‘enfant terrible of psychoanalysis’, arrived on the scene, he to all intents and purposes brought into play and disrupted the secure mental base of both parents and masters tirelessly investigating how knowledge in analysis arises, how it is reached, and how it is transmitted. And, in proceeding through this line of inquiry (that is, considering which particular values, feelings and responses guide, facilitate or impede the analytic conversation and the subjectivation of the patient), he started to pay close attention to the place assigned to the ‘other’ and his specificity in the course of coupling, a coupling that Ferenczi wished to make quite mutually profitable and satisfying, and not at all inappropriate or traumatic.

To put it another way, just like the intelligent, curious and at the same time highly sensitive and vulnerable child he came to describe, Ferenczi was not interested in knowing purely how one is born or how one grows as a person (patient or analyst). His focus, on the contrary, was on investigating the dynamics and objectives of any encounter between two minds, questioning the quality and rhythm of their exchange as well as the pleasure or displeasure each member of the couple feels. Hence, he did not settle for mere factual information – which is always external – about what he calls the ‘botanical’ aspects of ‘mental coition’ (Ferenczi, S., 1908c, p. 281; 1927a, pp. 69-71): he was aiming at something much more intimate and profound which has to do with the libidinal and affective characteristics that generate meaning and significance within the relationship. ‘Gardening of the soul’ (‘horticulture’, Ferenczi, S., 1908c, p. 281) and ‘obstetric propensity’ (Ferenczi, S., 1919a, p. 182) – these were some of Ferenczi's evocative metaphors to outline the analyst's ability to intuitively individuate that what his patient mainly desires is not a correct explanation but to feel ‘how’ the analyst has himself passed through the turbulence and the emotional crisis similar to that being experienced by the patient as a part of the act of arriving at the interpretation4.

Suffice to recall here that this theme – the origin and nature of psychological understanding – was to be the very subject of Ferenczi's opening remarks in the 1928 paper that I am discussing. However, the theme of efficient coupling, its fruits and disturbances, was – as I have underlined (Borgogno, F., 1999a, 1999b)5– also the subject of Ferenczi's first psychoanalytic paper of 1908, The Effect on Women of Premature Ejaculation in Men (Ferenczi, S., 1908a), where, in a way that was highly original for its time, he studied premature ejaculation on the basis of its effects on women, taking on a strongly relational perspective in emphasising the relevance of the rhythm and tempo of the encounter, and giving particular weight to the specific idiosyncrasies of the partner. This latter constitutes a research approach that Ferenczi had already anticipated in 1902 in the surprising treatment of Rosa K (Ferenczi, S., , in Mészáros, J., 1999), a woman who felt herself to be a man, when he had asked the patient to write down her life history on the grounds that this was a case where the psychiatrist would certainly know less about her transvestite condition than she knew herself.

Showing respect for, and safeguarding, the voice of the ‘other’ (first and foremost, the voice of the infant and child) were, therefore, from the onset crucial values for Ferenczi, and this is particularly evident if we are to follow his way of thinking through the wealth of observations he made regarding ‘trauma’ and ‘the traumatic’ in all his writings. Indeed, a significant ‘red thread’ runs across many of the histories of neglected children that lie behind Ferenczi's first cases (the little boy who, during an operation for hydrocele, suddenly found his mouth covered with a chloroform mask, cit. in 1929; the little girl whose father, a smoker, put his tongue between her lips whenever he kissed her, 1908b; the boy whose mother could not bear it when his voice broke because she perceived its full and sonorous masculine bass tonality as a sign of his dawning manhood and an incestuous fixation that would be dangerous for her, 1915) and this same ‘red thread’ is connected with the analysis style of his mature period when, having concentrated his reflection on the traumatic situations, he became especially careful – albeit with obvious deficiencies – not to introduce words and feelings that would be alien or foreign to the heart, mouth or mind of the ‘other’. This is the clinical approach on which I am focusing and which made Ferenczi the natural precursor of many psychoanalysts belonging to the British Independent School (Borgogno, F., 1995) and to the American Relational Trend (Berman, E., 1998).

To sum up, in Ferenczi's project, it was the discovery, appreciation and protection of alterity that provided the key to his approach

towards, and centred on, the patient in the exploration of the unconscious, that unconscious which Freud had posited as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. This exploration, as Ferenczi would continue to suggest throughout his analytical journey, could not be reduced to either the endorsement of a given form of ‘acritical and mimetic identification’ with the aggressor, or a sort of ‘suggestively hypnotic submission to a fetish’. It is precisely in this area – as Ferenczi made clear in the conclusion to his 1928 essay – that the analyst must be on his guard, since here, more than anywhere else, lurks one of the greatest perils for an analysis: the danger of a ‘slavish obedience’ to the unconscious, parasitic and narcissistic components of the Super-ego (Ferenczi, S., 1928a, p. 101). Right at this juncture, for Ferenczi, lies that insidious trap which, demanding that mobility of the libido be renounced and the consequent sacrifice of the future potential ‘becoming’ of the two subjects involved, kills the very dialogue that the analysis seeks to promote and realize intra- and inter-psychically.

The Journey and the Model

For the reasons I have just stated, Ferenczi, more than any other psychoanalytic pioneer, personifies the essence of psychoanalysis as an authentic exercise of thought and sensitivity placed at the service of the patient and the understanding of his suffering, so much so that the famous observation by Granoff ‘if Freud invented psychoanalysis, it was Ferenczi who embodied it‘ (Granoff, W., 1958, p. 85) seems entirely appropriate.

From his early sorties as an analyst, in fact, psychoanalysis for Ferenczi was not the somewhat rational and cognitive activity of transmitting knowledge about the unconscious, as it often proved to be in his time, but above all a live experience: one that comes from the heart and is rooted in an affective relationship and dialogue, upon which reflection proceeds by trial and error. Starting from this ardent ‘conviction’6 he effectively was to introduce an innovative praxis foreshadowing a future paradigm change that shifted the accent of the analysis from a more distancing and objective gaze focused on verbal material to the study of the intersubjective-communicative interaction between transference and counter-transference, both in the ‘here and now’ of the session and in the unfolding of a psychoanalysis.

By undertaking such a change in technique he would, of course, come to reject the inevitable pedagogical, philosophical and religious appeal, undeniably at work when the analyst approaches the treatment with an excessively strong and well-defined theory, and would, as a consequence, increasingly opt for the notion of an emotional test and momentary suspension of judgment, filtered and reinforced by his working-through of the patient's resonance on him, as its chosen means of encounter and instrument of understanding.

Although this orientation taken by Ferenczi may – at a first glance – seem somewhat more provisional, it was in reality much more daring and complex and, in his view, the psychoanalytic route par excellence, the route that can realize the evenly-suspended attention recommended by Freud and recompose ‘the dissociation of sensibility‘ which is at the root of mental distress (Ferenczi, S., 1919a)7. Moreover, in his opinion, this was the best way of overcoming the often arid and restrictive limits of language and representation; to wit: a means to truly contain that which defies thought.

For Ferenczi, in practice, the first moment of knowledge requires that the analyst identify with, and lose himself in the ‘other’ – in the relationship. It is exclusively by temporarily forgoing the idealisation of consciousness in favour of unquestioningly exposing himself to all the unconscious libidinal movements necessary to sustain a relationship that he can really enter into contact with the singularity of any relationship and slowly become able to put it into words that have authentic significance in the present8. Solely in this way might he concretely, without wishing to possess them a priori, play host and give a name to the myriad messages that the two unconsciouses send each other. As a consequence, we could say that it was Ferenczi's major task to reconnect – guided by the variable and unpredictable lengths of time that the messages require – both with the vital elementary needs and universal desires that foster them and with the objects to which the messages are imaginarily addressed9.

In this conception of the psychoanalytic process as primarily a two-way exchange of lived experience and unconscious communications, we can see Ferenczi engaged in a dialogue with Freud, the theoretician of the two unconsciouses engaged in a dialogue (Freud, S., 1912), but an equally valid model of reference would be the Freud of the period I like to call that of ‘Little Hans and his surroundings‘10. I have in mind here the Freud of Psychotherapy (Freud, S., 1905), when, in his attempt to claim a place for psychoanalysis among the sciences, he first

endorses the self-restraint of the analyst that operates ‘per via di levare’ and not ‘per via di porre’, and then preconsciously offers the floor to Shakespeare's Hamlet, who shows how only through the heart – or rather, by being sincerely and profoundly open within a relationship – can we meet the ‘mystery of another person's heart’. This is, evidently, the same Freud who only a few years later, now in his capacity as a supervisor of Little Hans and his father, was able – also thanks to his own self-analysis – to begin to take ‘a second look’ at his work and give a greater help to the working couple , assuming both a more measured and fruitful distance from his early – overpowering and colonizing – passion for theory and interpretation, and a consequent closer contact with the sensitive, intelligent preconscious responses that the child in the patient signalled to him.

This model, on the ground of which knowledge is in transit and the subject of discourse partly unfolds unbeknown to the two partners that form the relationship (that is, to the analyst too), was exactly, in my view, the core of Ferenczi's first technical paper: On Transitory Symptom-Constructions During the Analysis (1912a). In this paper, which has gone almost unremarked in the rich contemporary literature on his thought, if Ferenczi brought to light, besides to the importance of the verbal language, that of the ‘discourse of the body‘ when the more desirable verbal route to awareness is not available (thus anticipating as many have noted the writings of Groddeck and W. Reich), he really did much more than that: he noted the effect of the analyst's silences and words on the other, and stressed that the patient's reaction is indicative not merely of his affective particular mode of listening but of the quality of the participation of the analyst as well.

He understood the pre-verbal, verbal, and non-verbal responses of the patient to be a secret, hidden and sometimes dissociated comment on the attitudes and mental functioning expressed by the analyst at a given moment in the session and in the analytic relationship.

Ferenczi, in other words, started from here in putting forward useful amendments to the analytic process. On the one hand – prefiguring, for example, the Rosenfeld of Impasse and interpretation (1987), the Ferro of The bi-personal field (1992) and, in a sense, the Faimberg of the Listening to listening (1996) – he understood the pre-verbal, verbal, and non-verbal responses of the patient to be a secret, hidden and sometimes dissociated comment on the attitudes and mental functioning expressed by the analyst at a given moment in the session and in the analytic relationship (see also Ferenczi, S., 1913c, 1919b, 1921, 1929). On the other – being particularly able to accept to ‘live through’ and be surprised by the ‘other’ that is inside himself no less than inside the patient (Borgogno, 2011) – he came even to broach the realm of projective identifications later to be discovered by his student, Melanie Klein (1946), and subsequently explored by Bion (an analysand of Klein previously analyzed by Rickman, another of Ferenczi's students and fervent supporters).

Being, in this decidedly open and unwearied position, inspired to pursue a more attentive and more humble form of listening – and on this matter he differs from the most rigid and dogmatic aspects of Klein and of the Kleinians (at least those of the first generation) – the analyst for Ferenczi must be willing to ‘abdicate’ power and knowledge in their most arrogant manifestations, since his understanding and interpretations, not necessarily ‘at target’, could, on the contrary, present errors, with the effect of constraining and inhibiting growth. But errors and deficits – he added – even when they are signs of some kind of failure11 are at the same time potential means to knowledge and an occasion for re-opening and re-transcribing the past, providing that the analyst can accept being ‘found out’ by them, generously harbouring a ‘otherness in the making’ that he must not erase in the daily process of analysing it. This is a point of view that Winnicott, undoubtedly impressed by work of Ferenczi and the Balints (Borgogno, F., 2006), carried forward and which today has been broadly theorised in the United States using the notion of enactment (Jacobs, T., 1986; Ogden, T., 2001).

To recapitulate the stretch of the journey I have been illustrating thus far, Ferenczi aimed to temper the narcissism and surreptitious suggestiveness lurking behind the analyst's attempt to carry out his function and, in line with his new sensitivity towards the patient's responses to interpretation and to the deeply rooted ways of being of the analyst during the session, he began to vigorously check for, and root out, signs of ‘belief’ or ‘disbelief’ towards analysis (1913b)12 giving gradually more value to the patient's criticisms, the ‘larval’ forms (Ferenczi, S., 1919a, 1919b, 1919c) in which these appeared, often concealed beneath

Moreover, Ferenczi's wish to verify personally (in the manner of a latter-day Aquinas), and from case to case, the validity of the Freudian concepts and technical procedures, was his peculiar way to call into play – admittedly with some ingenuousness and a certain discontinuity in his conduct – the point of view of the patient14, activating and reawakening him to non-alienated mental life (this was the real meaning of his “active technique”), also when neither patient nor analyst fully possessed the instruments to reach this objective. While such research – considered by many obscure if not ‘deviant’ – was surely excessive, for Ferenczi it was a mandatory step for moderating presumption and arrogance, as well as avoiding consecrating one's own preconceptions and prejudices in the pursuit of truth. Therefore, we could say today that, if Ferenczi erred, it was in the poetic and etymological sense of the word: he left the beaten track of tradition, in order not to elude those questions that would enable knowledge to progress and also to nourish and alert our authentic epistemophilic movement towards its shadow zone.

Ferenczi pioneered an analytical approach whose ultimate goal was to render the patient less permeable to the archaic and unwitting valencies of incorporation and introjection.

In brief, throughout his life, Ferenczi's work is a model of psychoanalytic commitment and a career-long homage to our discipline and to its founder. As he explored and adopted technical modifications, he always tried to learn from experience – an attitude which culminated in his inaugurating what he calls in The Elasticity of Technique ‘a metapsychology of the analyst's mental processes during analysis’ (1928a, p. 98). In effect, what he there proposed was that we reflect on the active components involved in the analyst's communications and noncommunications, since these are ineluctably unconscious manifestations that surpass even the best intentions of abstinence and neutrality. In this sense, Ferenczi dedicated all his passion and enthusiasm to seeking out the origins of transformation experimentally and, in particular, those which are still missing, still to come (what is ‘to come’, as he wrote), and this is what may be, or may become the future subject of knowledge, since it is we analysts who have authorised ourselves to embody it and who are the first to encounter it.

Conclusions

“What does Ferenczi meant by ‘elasticity of technique’?”, then, the reader might well still ask. The answer is given by Ferenczi himself, who borrows a felicitous metaphor from one of his patients in his 1928 paper on elasticity. It involves remaining at one end of an ‘elastic band’ in complete contact with the patient, as we have been and may continue to be, in the analytic encounter, but resolute – as regards to the functions required of us and for consistency's sake – in our role as depository and receiver both of his symbolic destiny as a subject and of his hopes and fears for the future15. We must be companions in our participation (in the sense of participating ‘with’ but also ‘towards’, and if necessary, ‘in place of’ the patient)16 – Ferenczi adds – to help the patient transform his anxieties, conflicts and traumas into something thinkable: something that could be linked to one's personal history17 and so be integrated into an affectively vital identity that heralds more effective existential options and more practicable and fitting life solutions. At the end, this is the kind of transformation which, for Ferenczi, can make the patients no longer uncritically dependent on the internal and external world and better able to discriminate phantasy from reality, self from other, and, when required, to separate themselves from the devastatingly harmful effects caused by objects, which in the past were of little use in really tutoring them in terms of their own specificity.

To conclude: with his concept of “elasticity of technique”, Ferenczi pioneered an analytical approach whose ultimate goal was to render the patient less permeable to the archaic and unwitting valencies of incorporation and introjection (Borgogno, F., 2009). He did this first of all by, loyally and synergistically (with that imaginative and elaborative identification

which was for him ‘tact’), encouraging and sustaining the development of the capacity to barricade oneself against invasions (a ‘noentry’ capacity), preventing ‘the other’ from displaying the kind of affectivity whereby the latter imposes his own heterogeneous needs, feelings, anxieties, and inappropriate mentalities and ideologies. This is a healthy defence mechanism, which present-day and future analysts who ‘ally themselves with psychic life‘ may contribute towards constructing as an anti-traumatic barrier not only against possible attempts at intrusion or projection but also against the extrajection of aspects of the self which, instead, may flourish, as long as they are confirmed and validated, or which are awaiting a new possibility to be born (M. Balint, 1968; Heimann, 1989; Bollas, 1987, 1989; Borgogno, 1997).