Ferenczi Sándor

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1873-1933

A Hungarian neurologist and psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi was born in Miskolc on July 7, 1873, and died in Budapest on May 22, 1933. He was the eighth of eleven children of Baruch Fraenkel (who changed his name to Bernát Ferenczi), a bookseller, printer, and ticket agent, and Róza Eibenschütz, both of whom were Jews from Galicia, Poland. His father died when he was fifteen. After studying at the Protestant school in his home town, Ferenczi went to Vienna to study medicine, obtaining his diploma in 1894. He became interested in psychology while still a student.

Ferenczi first practiced medicine at the Rókus Hospital in Budapest and then specialized in neurology at the Szent Erzsébet (Saint Elizabeth) Hospital. After 1899 he contributed to the medical journal Gyógyászat (Therapeutics). These early articles demonstrate Ferenczi's interest in clinical medicine and psychology.

Ferenczi read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams shortly after its appearance but was not impressed by the work. A few years later, after he adopted Carl Gustav Jung's association test, he became more receptive to Freud's ideas, and on February 2, 1908, together with another Hungarian doctor, he made his first visit to Freud. This was the beginning of a close friendship between the two men that lasted until Ferenczi's death. In 1908 they began their correspondence (comprising approximately one thousand four hundred letters), an exchange that had a profound effect on the history of psychoanalysis. At the first psychoanalytic meeting, which took place in Salzburg on April 27, 1908, Ferenczi presented the paper "Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy," the first psychoanalytic work devoted to the subject.

Because many of his friends were writers and artists, Ferenczi played an active role in the cultural life of Budapest, which was being swept at this time by currents of modernism. The Freudian ideas for which he became the spokesman were well received by his writer friends but rejected by most medical doctors.

To help introduce psychoanalysis to Hungary, Ferenczi gave a number of talks. He gradually became Freud's closest disciple and spent a number of summer vacations with the Freud family, often traveling with Freud. In 1909, when Freud visited Clark University in the United States, Ferenczi accompanied him (along with Jung) and helped prepare his presentations. In 1909 Ferenczi published "Introjection et transfert" (Introjection and transference; 1990a), his first theoretical work.

In 1910, following a suggestion by Freud, he proposed the creation of the International Psychoanalytical Association with Jung as president, and in 1913 founded the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association with István Hollós (a psychiatrist), Lajos Lévy (a doctor), Sándor Radó (a medical student), and Hugo Ignotus (whose real name was Hugo Veigelsberg and who was the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde literary review Nyugat [The Occident]). That same year Ernest Jones began analysis with Ferenczi.

After experiencing a series of personal problems in 1911 (his interminable hesitation between Gizella Pálos, a married woman and his mistress since 1905, and Elma, her eldest daughter), Ferenczi asked Freud to analyze him. The analysis took place in three parts, one in 1914 and the other two in 1916. The analysis was cut short by the First World War, but also by Freud's reluctance to get involved in matters he feared, not without reason, would have negative repercussions on their relationship. In the end Ferenczi married Gizella in 1919 without ever completely forgiving Freud for having influenced his decision. In 1916 Ferenczi undertook the analysis of Géza Roheim and Melanie Klein and played a key role in discovering their talent.

September 1918 marked the highpoint of psychoanalysis in Hungary. The Fifth International Congress took place at the Academy of Sciences in Budapest, with participation of representatives from the government, who were interested in psychoanalytic work on war neuroses. During the congress, Ferenczi was elected president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. A few months later, because of political and social events in Hungary, which was then independent of Austria, Ernest Jones succeeded him as president. The following year, during the short-lived Hungarian Commune, Ferenczi obtained a chair in psychoanalysis at the university. This was taken from him when the right-wing government under Miklós Horthy came to power. In 1920 he was also expelled from the Hungarian medical association.

After 1919 Ferenczi devoted himself exclusively to the care of his patients and the development of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1925, with Vilma Kovács, one of his analysands and students, he worked out the methods of a system of training, and in 1931 he founded a psychoanalytic clinic, with himself as director. At the same time he continued his research and theoretical work, which focused primarily on technique.

In 1924 Ferenczi and Otto Rank published Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (The development of psychoanalysis [1925]). The book was criticized, principally by Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones, and then by Freud. When Rank broke with Freud, Ferenczi reaffirmed his commitment to Freud and published an article criticizing Rank's work. In 1924 he published Thalassa (1963), a work highly regarded by Freud for its use of Lamarckian ideas.

In 1926 and 1927 Ferenczi spent six months in the United States giving lectures and training candidates, not all of whom were doctors. His position in favor of lay analysis alienated a large part of the American psychoanalytic community, which was committed to limiting psychoanalytic practice to medical doctors.

Ferenczi's technical experiments between 1918 and 1932, which were conducted to make psychoanalysis accessible to patients who showed signs of pregenital disturbances, created dissension between him and Freud. The conflict embittered his final years and affected the entire psychoanalytic community. He gave his last lecture, "Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child" (1949), in 1932 at the Wiesbaden Congress. Already suffering from pernicious anemia, he died on May 22, 1933, in Budapest.

Ferenczi made an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory and technique. On the theoretical level, he introduced the concept of introjection, was the first to focus on object relations, and developed theories of trauma and regression. In Thalassa he presented a number of fertile hypotheses on the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of genitality, or a sex life.

Above all, Ferenczi thought of himself as a doctor and held that it was not up to the patient to present himself as analyzable but up to the analyst to find suitable techniques for healing his patients. He successively developed several therapeutic techniques:

1. He developed the so-called active technique, whereby the analysand is asked to do whatever will promote free associations or to refrain from doing whatever might impede them.
2. To help mediate the authoritarian nature of the active method, he developed the technique of elasticity and permissiveness. Here, pushing tolerance of regression to its extremes, he allowed the traumatized patient to experience his symptoms anew.
3. He developed what is known as mutual analysis—an attempt doomed to failure and quickly abandoned—which was intended to spare traumatized patients the consequences of misunderstanding and blind spots on the part of the analyst.

Ferenczi occupies an important place in the development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory and played an important role in propagating psychoanalytic ideas and contributing to the understanding and global awareness of psychoanalysis. His disagreement with Freud during the last years of his life, as well as the uneasiness caused by the almost superhuman demands he made on the analyst, have relegated his work to obscurity for nearly fifty years. However, on closer examination of the history of the twentieth century, the relevance of his ideas becomes obvious. Owing to the efforts of Michael Balint, who edited Ferenczi's collected works, and the appearance in 1988 of his Clinical Diary, a unique document in the field of psychoanalysis, the value of his ideas has been recognized wherever psychoanalysis is practiced.

Bibliography

Ferenczi, Sándor. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 225-230.

——. (1963). Thalassa: A theory of genitality (Henry Alden Bunker, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1924) ——. (1974). Les fantasmes provoqués. In his Oeuvres complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 3). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1924) ——. (1988). The clinical diary of Sándor Ferenczi Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

——. (1990a). Introjection et transfert. In his Oeuvres complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 1). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1909) ——. (1990b). Le développement du sens de la réalité et ses stades. In his Oeuvres complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 2, pp. 51-64). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1913) ——. (1996). Le traumatisme psychique. In his Oeuvres complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 4, pp. 82-97). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1932)

Ferenczi, Sándor, and Rank, Otto. (1925). The development of psychoanalysis (Caroline Newton, Trans.). New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co. (Original work published 1924)

—EVA BRABANT-GERÖ