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Sandor Ferenczi was one of the most important figures in the psychoanalytic movement from 1908, when he came to Vienna to meet Freud, up to his death in 1933. Like Jung, who came to Vienna to meet Freud a year earlier, Ferenczi was already an established psychiatrist, with some years of clinical experience, and a number of publications, when he met the Master. At that first meeting, he made an enormously favourable impression, and became one of Freud’s most important intellectual collaborators and the member of his psychoanalytic inner circle to whom he was personally closest.
Unlike Freud, who was a genius of theory, but had only limited aptitude for and interest in the practice of psychotherapy, Ferenczi was a brilliant psychoanalytic clinician. Inevitably, as his experience as a therapist deepened, he began to focus on developing new thinking on ‘psychoanalytic technique’ – a topic that received only meagre treatment by Freud.
Ferenczi was described by those who knew him as warm, affectionate, caring, empathic, and above all, accepting and understanding of others. These qualities enabled him to make direct contact with the childhood experiences and emotions of his patients, and to be fully supportive of them as they struggled with the painful experiences they had suffered in their early lives.
As a result, he began to criticize Freud’s ‘classical technique’, and in his final papers (and his private ‘Clinical Diary’ written in 1932) moved decisively beyond what he saw as the limitations of Freud’s classical method.
These writings set him on an inevitable collision course with the Master, who allowed no disagreement with his central doctrines, and in the years immediately before Ferenczi’s death in 1933, Freud repudiated his ideas and attempted to have him labeled as ‘psychotic’ so that he could be written out of the history of the psychoanalytic movement.
Nevertheless, Ferenczi’s later writings contain many ideas and methods that anticipate the most important developments in modern psychoanalysis, and he has been re-discovered by contemporary psychoanalysts, and given his due position as one of the most original and creative figures in the movement, a brilliant clinician who continually searched for better ways to understand and heal his patients.
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SCHEDULE
Thursday 14 March, 1.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Session 1: Ferenczi’s life and his relationship with Freud.
Session 2: Ferenczi’s technical innovations and his ideas on the ‘Active Technique’ in psychoanalysis.
Friday 15 March, 1.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Session 3: Ferenczi’s theory of trauma, and his thinking on splitting as a psychic defence.
Session 4: Ferenczi and his relation to Freud’s early ‘Seduction Theory’ of the psychoneuroses.
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Speaker:
Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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Tickets £ 45
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