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The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi

A one day online course with Keith Barrett.

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28 February, 1:30 pm - 5:00 pm

£20

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All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. Time includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 1 month.

 

The current appreciation of the genius of Sandor Ferenczi may be said to have been sparked by the publication of his ‘Clinical Diary’ – the private journal he kept in 1932, the year before his death at the age of fifty-nine. The ‘Diary’ was first published in French in 1985, followed in 1988 by the German original and the English translation.

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. At their first meeting, he made an enormously favorable impression on Freud, and became one of his 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 had received only meagre treatment by Freud. As a result, in the final years of his life he became fiercely critical of 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 theory of neurosis.

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. As a result, it was decided that the ‘Clinical Diary’ should not be published at the time – that its publication should be delayed until a more favourable atmosphere existed for the unprejudiced reception of its groundbreaking ideas.

Since its eventual publication, in the 1980’s, Ferenczi 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.

On this three-hour course, we will explore the ‘Clinical Diary’, and the insights it contains into the nature of trauma. We will also examine Ferenczi’s views on Freud and on the topic of ‘Mutual Analysis’.

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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 £ 20

Members receive 20% off with their promocode.

A limited number of bursary places will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.

Details

Date:
28 February
Time:
1:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Cost:
£20
Event Categories:
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Venue

Online

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