Refine
Editorial
(1996)
Mute correspondence
(1996)
In The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume III, Ernest Jones explained the third wave of dissension as an effect of the progressive mental deterioration of two members of the Committee, who had governed the psychoanalytic movement: Rank and Ferenczi. While in relation to Rank, Jones made a partial recant, in relation to Ferenczi, he did not modify his assertions. Erich Fromm collected various testimonies by witnesses of Ferenczi's last years, all contrasting Jones's assertions, and challenged Jones's manner of writing his-tory. However, since Fromm was himself a dissident, and his witnesses were pupils, relatives or friends of Ferenczi's, they were discarded as >partisans<. The present study aims at reconsidering the question on the basis of many docu-ments, among which the 1958 report of Lajos Levy (Ferenczi's physician) to Anna Freud. The consulted documents do not support Jones's allegation of Ferenczi's insanity. At the same time, they show that Jones's allegation was not a one-man fabrication, but reflected a shared belief. Finally, the author attempts a reading of the possible function of this belief within the psychoanalytic commu-nity. It is pointed out that Ferenczi's emphasis on the analyst as a real person was incompatible with the strict conception of psychoanalysis, based on the theoretical rejection of the affective factors which was becoming dominant around 1957, and it is argued that the narrative of Ferenczi's >falling into insanity< represented an expression of the fear of remaining embroiled in the patient's affective net.
When Freud began his professional career, psychotherapy was already an established practice, standing upon the theory of ideogenesis, according to which certain motor symptoms were caused by ideas . This theory offered the rational ground for psychotherapy: if a symptom was provoked by an idea, it was possible to undo it by finding and erasing this very idea. Freud developed this theory into the model of unconscious ideas and into the technique of >interpreting the contents<. Whereas the later discoveries of resistance, transference, and character structure, should have promoted a break with the ideogenetic model, Freud never gave up the erroneous assumption that behind an action there was an idea, which had to be captured if one wanted to stop the action. This assumption was questioned again and again during the interminable controversy over the relative importance of remembering and experiencing: by Ferenczi and Rank in the Twenties, Alexander in the Fifties, and Gill in the Eighties, when they tried to shift the focus from remembering to experiencing, in order to make psychoanalysis an effective psychotherapy. Today, the view that what organizes our actions is stored in the form of >ideas< is no longer accepted by the scientific community. Instead, we speak of >operative models< and implicit or procedural memories.