Heroic, Heretic: Sandor Ferenczi
Freud's analysand died penniless and marginalized because he stood up to Freud, psycho-analytic careerists and the wealthy of Vienna.
Sandor Ferenczi was Freud’s analysand when Freud formulated his defining theories that later became orthodoxy. As an analysand, Ferenczi was something of a dramaturg to Freud’s logos, keeping his intentions and concepts on the straight and narrow. Freud’s practice was overwhelmed with a number of young wealthy women suffering from what was called “hysteria” (the origin hyster which is Latin for womb) and physical conversion, where psychological conflict was showing itself in clients through chronic physical pain, illness, and even blindness.
Freud and Ferenczi came to the shattering conclusion that these young women were being raped and sexually abused by trusted family members. It seemed the unspeakable was seeping out through the clients’ shame, rage and endless physical symptoms. Ferenczi supported Freud in revealing these conclusions and believed they would set forth in trying to heal these young women. Ferenczi was known for being remarkably empathic and adept in working with difficult cases. Freud however wanted to be a power broker (it looks as if he was anointed very early on) and revealing these findings would be social and economic suicide.
Freud, in lieu of previous findings, posited the monolithic Oedipus and Elektra complex(es), that explain that children desperately want to have sex with their parents, and the internal conflict and shame over this desire drives mental illness. The influence of this concept can also be seen in many medical models, for example, the idea that auto-immune illness is caused by “body attacking itself”: that the body inherently and for no external reason, will destroy its own organs. Freud’s super ego and id orchestrated a brutal betrayal of these young women that reverberated decades onward, protecting the abusers, and legitimizing the institutional practice of blaming the victim and their bodies for their “syndromes” — enabling the entire psychopharmacological industry and the practice of lobotomy.
The parasitic paradigm of power is to make as much money as possible off of human hosts and to cover the parasites’ wrong-doing by any means necessary. It is no coincidence that Freud is intellectual and familial heir to P.R. inventor Edward Bernays and Clement Freud (who was accused of child sexual abuse over three decades). We know that history is bought by and large, and Ferenczi was forced into footnote status, though his efforts were heroic. Ferenczi went his own way, retaining Freud’s original hypotheses. He kept his own practice, not without many personal and professional challenges, including disastrously falling in love with one of his patients, and becoming increasingly unpopular in polite mainstream society.
In 1932, Ferenczi gave a talk to the Wiesbaden Congress entitled “Confusion of Tongues.” The country was on the brink of totalitarianism, and both Freud and Ferenczi were quite ill. Ferenczi attempted to make amends with Freud and asked for his support and acceptance of the trauma theories presented. Freud would not grant either. The reception to the talk, as expected, was negative and the information deemed “delusional”. Freud killed any further publishing of “Confusion of Tongues.”
“Confusion of Tongues” is sadly ahead of its time. It may be ahead of our own time. Ferenczi’s tone retains humility and respect for the patient and an unwavering focus on causes rather than symptoms, as horrible as they may be. There’s no discernible stigmatizing or disrespect for the human subject. His understanding of the effects of narcissistic abuse are incisive and delicately perceptive:
Gradually, then, I came to the conclusion that the patients have an exceedingly refined sensitivity for the wishes, tendencies, whims, sympathies and antipathies of their analyst, even if the analyst is completely unaware of this sensitivity. Instead of contradicting the analyst or accusing him of errors and blindness, the patients identify themselves with him; only in rare moments of an hysteroid excitement, i.e. in an almost unconscious state, can they pluck up enough courage to make a protest; normally they do not allow themselves to criticize us, such a criticism does not even become conscious in them unless we give them special permission or even encouragement to be so bold. That means that we must discern not only the painful events of their past from their associations, but also—and much more often than hitherto supposed —their repressed or suppressed criticism of us…
I obtained above all new corroborative evidence for my supposition that the trauma, especially the sexual trauma, as the pathogenic factor cannot be valued highly enough. Even children of very respectable, sincerely puritanical families, fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose. Either it is the parents who try to find a substitute gratification in this pathological way for their frustration, or it is people thought to be trustworthy such as relatives (uncles, aunts, grandparents), governesses or servants, who misuse the ignorance and the innocence of the child. The immediate explanation—that these are only sexual fantasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying—is unfortunately made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g. of assaults upon children, committed by patients actually in analysis. That is why I was not surprised when recently a philanthropically-minded teacher told me, despairingly, that in a short time he had discovered that in five upper class families the governesses were living a regular sexual life with boys of nine to eleven years old…
When the child recovers from such an attack, he feels enormously confused, in fact, split—innocent and culpable at the same time—and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken. Moreover, the harsh behaviour of the adult partner tormented and made angry by his remorse renders the child still more conscious of his own guilt and still more ashamed. Almost always the perpetrator behaves as though nothing had happened, and consoles himself with the thought: "Oh, it is only a child, he does not know anything, he will forget it all." Not infrequently after such events, the seducer becomes over-moralistic or religious and endeavours to save the soul of the child by severity…
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