Sandor Ferenczi with Giselle Palos Ferenczi, Capri, 1922. Postcard sent to Georg Groddeck.
Psychoanalysts garner entertainment and education from parsing the long running, misery-filled melee between Freud and his follower, Ferenczi. Like many good sagas, it offers stories replete with articulate protagonists, and, endless dissections of desertions, desires, denouements, deaths, and desuetude.
But first: the Oedipal tragedy:
Freud fancied firstly that he was a conquerer and his heroes were conquerers.
According to Kahn(2012), the analogy of the conquerer for the psychoanalytic weltanschauung extends only as far back as Freud’s self-analysis. From his earliest years, he felt powerful feelings of love toward his mother; jealousy and rivalry to his father. He used this retrospective memory as a connection to the Oedipus legend. According to Kilbourne (2008), this self-analysis, “spared him the shame of having to reveal himself to another person.” (Kilbourne, 2008, p.4). Instead of the word ‘shame’, after all introspection was a valid 19th century research technique; perhaps the construct of vulnerability is more apt. Freud averts his gaze from the onset of the story, where Laius the father begins the fatal trajectory of events through attempted filicide. Or the part of the myth where the Sphinx, an authority figure, causes the Theban plague. Freud only focuses on the patricidal son. The Oedipal theory as delineated by Freud postulates murderous feelings of rivalry against the father for the mother by a young boy, who must deal with his fear of castration by his father as punishment for this desire. Some note how Freud’s weltanschauung here depicts his ambivalent relationship with his mother, (Ferenczi, 1933; Kramer, 1995) his misunderstanding of feminine psychology (Horney, 1937), as degrading the mother (Fromm, 1955), his “failure to recognize the common bond between father and son.” (Colman, 2000, p.526), or his enmeshment in a patriarchal culture which emphasizes competition, jealousy, and prolonged dependency (Sullivan, 1925). Freud’s Oedipus is blind to such critiicsms, he is a heroic conqueror, invulnerable, seeking no comforts save the usual externalia of such tales: a queen and a kingdom. Oedipus the conquerer has agency over his life and is not the victim of his fate.
But wrecking as a precursor to rule did not begin with Oedipus. He is a much later dramatization of such earlier Greek creation myths, such as those of Uranus, Chronos, and Zeus.
According to Greek creation myths, the world begins with Chaos, a void. After that come Gaea and Eros. Gaea brought Uranus, (the heavens and sky) Pontus, and the Mountains. Uranus was to surround and cover Gaea. This was the first power couple. Gaea with Uranus had 12 Titans, three Cyclops, and three Hecatonchires (hundred headed creatures).
Uranus feared a coup d’etat led by his progency; thus, he restocked Gaea’s womb with them, one at a time after their birth. Naturally, this one-sided decision over the use of her body and the loss of her children created grief in Gaea, who countered by giving her youngest, Cronus, a sickle to castrate his father. This blood later produced the Furies, Giants, and Melian nympths. From the testicles grew Aphrodite. Cronus rescued his Titan siblings and shared the world with them. He marries Rhea (his sister) and suffers the return of the repressed—the torment of being usurped by his children, thus, he swallowed his children. Rhea, to spare her youngest Zeus, gave Chronos a stone in his stead, sending Zeus to Crete. Zeus, in adulthood, rescues his siblings, usurps Chronos and the Titans (their uncles and aunts) and establishes the rule of the Olympian gods. (Greek-Gods.info, n.d.).
In all three Greek tales, one sees what can only be called the Gaea geste, where the wife colludes against her husband in order to save her son. The female is the invisible but ultimate power in the relationships. This motif appears in the overthrow of Uranus, Chronos, and (ineffectually) in Oedipus, as Jocasta urges Oedipus to avert his gaze and not investigate overmuch. In each tale, inevitably the fatal coup comes as a surprise only to the tyrannical ruler. And in each, if not for a Gaea geste, the world would become void.
As Colman (2000) noted in his summary of such myths: “one partner devours; the other is devoured…” (Colman, 2000, p. 522). Steiner (1999)added: “[The]child is required to submit in fear to the dominating power and control exercised by the father, if the child solves the problem of his hatred through identification he will in turn become afraid of being overthrown by his own sons and will treat them with the same tyrannical power his father used with him. (p. 23).
This was the Freudian weltanschauung which resonated with well-educated males socialized within the Hapsburg monarchy. In a monarchy, the only civil way a prince can attain full power is to be crowned king upon the death of his father. Further complicating this is that in a hierarchical culture, adult princes who suffer the misfortune to have long-lived parents are often figures of public ridicule (Victoria's son Edward, for example, or Elizabeth's II Charles), for while the king has a fairly well-defined role, that of the prince is more ambiguous. By contrast, in a democratic culture, mechanisms exist to insure routine transitions to power. Adult roles are more fluid and less dependent on parental status.
Whether or prince or a king, power was a patrimony, to be kept from females. This was the weltanschauung which created diagnoses such as hysteria, a disorder which reflected male ignorance of female sexual needs and male disdain for non-traditional feminine roles. Males refused to see or believe that females could want to be, as Plath would later say,”the place an arrow shoots off from... want[ed] change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions [themselves]” (Plath, 1971, p. 83). Instead of understanding what females wanted was adult options, Freud chose to concretize their problems with a penis, ignoring the underlying interpretation.
Options for everyone was not in the Freudian weltanschauung. Freud despised democratic societies: he loathed America, Americans, and American émigrés. He once stated, “It is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.” (Jones, 1955, p. 60). And so, within the psychoanalytic realm, Freud is the potentate, Ferenczi, as well as all of Freud’s other viziers are impotent: biologically and metaphorically, as in such realms, the viziers serve solely at the king’s pleasure. Freud’s grand viziers were to learn Freud’s science and set up outposts in their territories. As tokens of their status and as symbols of their favor, they were gifted with special signet rings. They were not equals, but apostles. And their status could be summarily stripped from them. Freud unilaterally expelled Rank, Jung, and Adler and instructed the remainder to ostracize them. (Ferenczi, 1932/1988).
But along came Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was the eighth of twelve children, born to Polish émigrés. His father, Bernat came to Hungary to participate in the 1848 revolution and stayed on afterward. Democratic principles were his patrimony. Baruch Frenkel, Ferenczi’s father, was a hero who fought to free Hungary from Austrian dominion. In 1879, when Sandor was six, their surname of Fraenkel was Maygarized into Ferenczi, with Bernat rejecting an opportunity to ennoble the name with the prefix, ‘von.’ This represents a serious commitment toward the democratic ideal. For a Hungarian Jew of Bernat’s generation, the opportunity to became a nobleman, or an “uri” represented the pinnacle of achievement. Bernat’s contemporaries paid serious funds, endowed powerful others, or arranged marriages for their nubile children to garner the garland which Bernat Fraenkel waived. (Patai, 1999). He died when Ferenczi was 15, a critical period as adolescents endeavor to establish a distinct identity for themselves, separate from their parents. (Erikson, 1968). Ferenczi was deprived of his opportunity to realistically evaluate his father and became stuck, an “enfant terrible,” failing to establish a mature identity for himself. . These affects might be unconsciously projected onto the mother, for surviving. Instead of anger that Bernat abandoned his eight surviving children and anxiety over Rosa’s ability to handle her new dual parental role, Ferenczi, still in school, may have experienced himself as a terrified child alongside his three younger siblings. Unlike Jacob Freud, who lost his heroic potential to his young son when he colluded with the established inferior social status of Jews by failing to protest when a gentile knocked his hat off, Ferenczi’s father was an honored hero who died when Ferenczi was 15, a critical period as adolescents endeavor to establish a distinct identity for themselves, separate from their parents. At two crucial identity forming times—name change at age six, with its issue of who am I in my family; death of father at age fifteen, with its issues of who am I in the world; Ferenczi confronted identity issues both in the micro and macro world.
Peers offer some value in a world where love is frequently lost or misplaced. Ferenczi cites Heine’s (1969) poem, “The Book of Songs,” in his Clinical Journal (1932/1988). The poem begins, “Das ist der alte Marchenwald!” This was the forest of fairy tales. The moon, notorious as a symbol of feminine power and feminine fertility cycles, has “seized” the narrator in her powers. Non-maternal, female sexual power is a longstanding theme in Ferenczi’s weltanschauung, as evidenced not only here, but as later will be seen, in Vorosmarty’s (1841) poem, “Petike.” As opposed to Freud, who, regardless of whether it was Dora or Frau Elfriede, could only view females as normal within secure destined confines of daughter, wife, and/or mother. (Freud, 1905/1963; Falzeder, 1994).
In the Heine (1969) poem, as the narrator walked along the path, he heard a nightingale sing of “’love, and lovers’ pain.” Her song caused the narrator to reminisce. He then saw a castle of desolation, guarded by a sphinx, a “hybrid of lust and dread,/With a lion’s body, a lion’s claws/But a woman’s breast and head.” He fell in love with the face and kissed it, which caused the “marble features [to come] to life.” He cannot remove himself and began to suffocate from her ardor, he found his position tortuous but cannot leave, “ravishing torture and blissful pain!/Terror and ecstacy!” Again, the female is described as a powerful raptor and the narrator is impotent to remove himself from the situation—it is the nightingale who tries to save him by questioning the sphinx’s right to kill by exploiting the desire she incites: “The nightingale sang: ‘Oh beautiful sphinx!/…Why must your ecstasy by mixed/With such inhuman pain…Explain to me…Your riddle of laughter and tears!/For I have pondered over this/Thousands and thousands of years.” (Heine,1969).
This lethargy through vexed love motif is repeated in “Petike,” where the lover is a schoolboy, unwilling to engage in a life where his love is not reciprocated:
Little Peter sits there, mournful and sad,
Ha ha ha!
….His mother regards him with faithful eyes…
She thinks that perhaps her dear son
Is ailing…. (Vorosmarty, 1841)
In this poem, the challenger is the protagonist’s mother, who tries to offer solace, only to find what she offers if of little value, as her son wishes only for death, saying, “I have but a single friend/And that is death….” (Vorosmarty, 1841). Mother does not collude in this desire, and as she cannot replace his love interest, she structures the alternatives compellingly and returns him to life: “Rascal Peter! So that’s what was wrong!....He doesn’t want to eat or drink,/But only to dally with Juliette….And now get up! To school with you….And don’t let me catch you moping about, ../Enough of these sighs and tears!” (Vorosmarty, 1841) Love’s life threatening commands pale when faced by the force of the life-giving mother.
Ferenczi’s protagonists are lovers who will not separate from their beloved, though they must abjure life itself. As Dryden (1678) once said of Cleopatra, “All for love; or the world well lost,” they are eventually conquered by the erotic object of their lust unless an external agent assists them.
Freud’s Oedipus by contrast, is the lone resolver, who does not deviate from the destined path. He is purposeful: a man blocks the road—he slays him; a sphinx asks a riddle; he responds. The right of the Sphinx to cause plagues or pose riddles is not of his concern. There is little introspection and less pondering about right or wrong. Freud’s use of the story allows no negotiations, no compromises.
Besides the heroic father who died while he was at a vulnerable age, Ferenczi’s larger world was the equal-opportunity Hungarian republic. The Law of Reception was passed while Ferenczi was entering young adulthood, according Judaism full equality with Christianity. Jews were allowed access to the professions. Although it was still difficult to enter the civil service, many Jews, including Ferenczi, entered the medical profession. (Patai, 1999).
During the Great War, Ferenczi treated traumatic disorders. In a letter to Freud on 2/22/15, he wrote of the analytic treatment of his army commander who was suffering from the trauma of a grenade explosion. He was still invested in intrapsychic causation here, it was not so much the grenade as “in reality [commandant] suffers from libido difficulties.” (Falzeder, et al, 1996, p. 50). The Great War rendered great trauma within Hungary—this country lost 93% of her armed forces as casualties and later, 71% of her territory due to the Treaty of Trianon. (Katzburg, 2007). Soon after, Hungarian analysts left for Berlin, such as Franz Alexander, the Balints, and Melanie Klein. Others, such as Sandor Rado, Geza Roheim, and Sandor Lorand; left for New York (Moreau-Ricard, 1996).
The Law of Reception lasted until 1920, when it was replaced by the Numerus Clausus which limited Jewish freedoms as well as imposing quotas on Jewish admissions to the university and the academy. No longer were Jews to be considered the equal of Christians. A genocide of Jews sanctioned by the fascist government depopulated towns. (Katzburg 2007).
Ferenczi certainly never denied having experienced trauma in his childhood. The fact that his father died is an expectable, ordinary woe of life, but not a trauma. However, as a middle-aged man, Ferenczi was repeatedly exposed to or suffered from adult onset trauma. The Great War, the defeat of the Central Powers, the rape of Hungary, and the repeal of the Law of Reception, alongside the White Terror of Horthy. Few challenged the torturing sphinx. Fewer protested or protected.
During Horthy’s White Terror, Ferenczi lost his professorship and resigned as the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). London, not Budapest became the IPA’s headquarters. (Berman, 2007). Around this time, Freud also showed indications of adult-onset trauma: within a short space of time, he experienced not only the death of his daughter Sophie, but those of his favorite grandson, Heinele, a nephew, Theo, pregnant niece, Cecelie, and a supporter, Anton von Freund. (Lieberman & Kramer, 2012). After his grandson’s death, Freud said, something in him was “killed” and he was “never able to form new attachments.” (Schur, p. 359). His response to this trauma was to retreat further into what Ferenczi(1932/1988) would later call his “well-ordered superego, “ and taking psychoanalysis further intrapsychic. After all, how can Freud compete with a conquistorador like Death. Ferenczi, unable to achieve the solace he craved within the authoritarian relationship extended by Freud, initiated a relationship with Georg Groddeck in September, 1921, shortly after the death of his mother.
daughter Sophie, but those of his favorite grandson, Heinele, a nephew, Theo, pregnant niece, Cecelie, and a supporter, Anton von Freund. (Lieberman & Kramer, 2012). After his grandson’s death, Freud said, something in him was “killed” and he was “never able to form new attachments.” (Schur, p. 359). His response to this trauma was to retreat further into what Ferenczi(1932/1988) would later call his “well-ordered superego, “ and taking psychoanalysis further intrapsychic. After all, how can Freud compete with a conquistorador like Death.
Ferenczi, unable to achieve the solace he craved within the authoritarian relationship extended by Freud, initiated a relationship with Georg Groddeck in September, 1921, shortly after the death of his mother. He suffered from nephrosclerosis and headaches at that time and sought treatment from Groddeck, as well as offering himself as an emissary and conduit to Freud. Groddeck interpreted his disease as a somatic manifestation of the individual’s straddling “two things…to be both childlike or grownup.” (Groddeck, 1923/1961, p. 188). Ferenczi found his stays there an “analytical holiday;” Groddeck reciprocated Ferenczi’s enthusiastic feelings. Writing of Ferenczi, he stated: “I feel so close to him…we have become good friends.” (Grossman & Grossman, 1965, pp.125-126). Ferenczi shaped his relationship with Groddeck into another sibship, where “disillusionment with parents, teachers, and other heroes, children unite among themselves and form alliances.” (Ferenczi, 1932/1988, p. 56). The accumulation of micro and macro post-war losses may have recapitulated him back into the time when the presence of his siblings helped to stabilize him then. When peril is perceived, younger children use their elder siblings as coping models. Perhaps Groddeck served such a stabilizing function here. Ferenczi’s letters to Groddeck were intimate and analytic, making him into a confederate against that austere Freud. He wrote to Groddeck about his early childhood sexual traumas, difficulties with his mother, and his continuing desire for Elma. (Fortune, 2002). The disclosure of trauma and of being heard and accepted, creates a new cohesion and renews ties to the larger world.
Indeed, Rudnytsky viewed this dyad as offering a mutual analytic therapy: “Each man became for the other a surrogate for Freud, with the result that both men’s relationship with Freud…cooled.” (Rudnytsky, 2002, p. 170).
Groddeck’s own weltanschauung was a vigourous counterpoint to the Oedipal, as he proclaimed that “I have never met any man who at the death of his mother has not had the feeling, ‘I, her son, have murdered her.’”(Rudnytsky, 2002, p.191). Groddeck, unlike Freud, had little problems assuming a maternal imago: “An analyst could be a mother figure, peer figure, any type of figure.” (Rudnytsky, 2002, p. 188). Furthermore, Groddeck, like Ferenczi, was attuned to the powerful role of the female. Unlike Freud, who believed females envy male prowess as concreted by the penis; Groddeck believed males envy female prowess, as concretized by the ability to give birth. However different their actual techniques, both Ferenczi and Groddeck wanted to provide a curative setting for the patient. As opposed to “learning” from them or “making money” off them, or fearing being made insane from the mere exposure to them. Ferenczi believed that mutual analysis, with its emphasis on empathy, validation, and congruence, offered curative elements for the patient.
