The Clinical Diary Of S Ndor Ferenczi

In the half-century since his death, the Hungarian analyst S ndor Ferenczi has amassed an influential following within the psychoanalytic community. During his lifetime Ferenczi, a respected associate and intimate of Freud, unleashed widely disputed ideas that influenced greatly the evolution of modern psychoanalytic technique and practice. In a sequence of short, condensed entries, S ndor Ferenczi's Diary records self-critical reflections on conventional theory--as well as criticisms of Ferenczi's own experiments with technique--and his obstinate struggle to divest himself and psychoanalysis of professional hypocrisy. From these pages emerges a hitherto unheard voice, speaking to his heirs with startling candor and forceful originality--a voice that still resonates in the continuing debates over the nature of the relationship in psychoanalytic practice.

Winner of the 2016 Gradiva Award for Edited Book The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi, first published in 1993 & edited by Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris, was one of the first books to examine Ferenczi’s invaluable contributions to psychoanalysis and his continuing influence on contemporary clinicians and scholars. Building on that pioneering work, The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor brings together leading international Ferenczi scholars to report on previously unavailable data about Ferenczi and his professional descendants. Many—including Sigmund Freud himself—considered Sándor Ferenczi to be Freud’s most gifted patient and protégé. For a large part of his career, Ferenczi was almost as well known, influential, and sought after as a psychoanalyst, teacher and lecturer as Freud himself. Later, irreconcilable differences between Freud, his followers and Ferenzi meant that many of his writings were withheld from translation or otherwise stifled, and he was accused of being mentally ill and shunned. In this book, Harris and Kuchuck explore how newly discovered historical and theoretical material has returned Ferenczi to a place of theoretical legitimacy and prominence. His work continues to influence both psychoanalytic theory and practice, and covers many major contemporary psychoanalytic topics such as process, metapsychology, character structure, trauma, sexuality, and social and progressive aspects of psychoanalytic work. Among other historical and scholarly contributions, this book demonstrates the direct link between Ferenczi’s pioneering work and subsequent psychoanalytic innovations. With rich clinical vignettes, newly unearthed historical data, and contemporary theoretical explorations, it will be of great interest and use to clinicians of all theoretical stripes, as well as scholars and historians.

Sándor Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn—the patient known as R.N. in the Clinical Diary—is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. In his latest groundbreaking work, Peter L. Rudnytsky draws on a trove of archival sources to provide a definitive scholarly account of this experiment, which constitutes a paradigm for relational psychoanalysis, as Freud’s self-analysis does for classical psychoanalysis. In Part 1, Rudnytsky tells the story of Severn’s life and traces the unfolding of her ideas, culminating in The Discovery of the Self. He shows how her book contains disguised case histories not only of Ferenczi and Severn herself—and thereby forms an indispensable companion volume to Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary—but also of Severn’s daughter Margaret, an internationally acclaimed dancer whose history of childhood sexual abuse uncannily replicated Severn’s own. Part 2 compares Severn to Clara Thompson and Izette de Forest as transmitters of Ferenczi’s legacy, sets the record straight about Ferenczi’s final illness, and reveals how Severn went beyond Freud and Groddeck in her capacity as Ferenczi’s analyst. Finally, in Part 3, Rudnytsky delineates the contrast between Freud and Ferenczi as men and thinkers and makes it clear why he agrees with Erich Fromm that Ferenczi’s example demonstrates how Freud’s attitude need not be that of all analysts. The first comprehensive study of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Severn, this book is a profound reexamination of Ferenczi’s relationship to Freud and an impassioned defense of Severn and Ferenczi’s views on the nature and treatment of trauma. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, especially to relational analysts, self psychologists, and trauma theorists.

This collection covers all the topics relevant for understanding the importance of Sándor Ferenczi and his influence on contemporary psychoanalysis. Pre-eminent Ferenczi scholars were solicited to contribute succint reviews of their fields of expertise. The book is divided in five sections. 'The historico-biographical' describes Ferenczi's childhood and student days, his marriage, brief analyses with Freud, his correspondences and contributions to daily press in Budapest, list of his patients' true identities, and a paper about his untimely death. 'The development of Ferenczi's ideas' reviews his ideas before his first encounter with psychoanalysis, his relationship with peers, friendship with Groddeck, emancipation from Freud, and review of the importance of his Clinical Diary. The third section reviews Ferenczi's clinical concepts and work: trauma, unwelcome child, wise baby, identification with aggressor, mutual analysis, and many others. In 'Echoes', we follow traces of Ferenczi's influence on virtually all traditions in contemporary psychoanalysis: interpersonal, independent, Kleinian, Lacanian, relational, etc.

Elizabeth Severn, known as "R.N." in Sandor Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary, was Ferenczi’s analysand for eight years, the patient with whom he conducted his controversial experiment in mutual analysis, and a psychoanalyst in her own right who had a transformative influence on his work. The Discovery of the Self is the distillation of that experience and allows us to hear the voice of one of the most important patients in the history of psychoanalysis. However, Freud branded Severn Ferenczi’s "evil genius" and her name does not appear in Ernest Jones’s biography, so she has remained largely unknown until now. This book is a reissue of Severn’s landmark work of 1933, together with an introduction by Peter L. Rudnytsky that sets out the unrecognized importance of her thinking both for the development of psychoanalysis and for contemporary theory. Inspired by the realization that Severn has embedded disguised case histories both of herself and of Ferenczi, as well as of her daughter Margaret, Rudnytsky shows how The Discovery of the Self contains "the other side of the story" of mutual analysis and is thus an indispensable companion volume to the Clinical Diary. A full partner in Ferenczi’s rehabilitation of trauma theory and champion of the view that the analyst must participate in the patient’s reliving of past experiences, Severn emerges as the most profound conduit for Ferenczi’s legacy in the United States, if not in the entire world. Lacking any institutional credentials and once completely marginalized, Elizabeth Severn can at long last be given her due as a formidable psychoanalyst. Newly available for the first time in more than eighty years, The Discovery of the Self is simultaneously an engaging introduction to psychotherapy that will appeal to general readers as well as a sophisticated text to be savored by psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians as a "prequel" to the works of Heinz Kohut and a neglected classic of relational psychoanalysis.

Elizabeth Severn: The ‘Evil Genius’ of Psychoanalysis chronicles the life and work of Elizabeth Severn, both as one of the most controversial analysands in the history of psychoanalysis, and as a psychoanalyst in her own right. Condemned by Freud as "an evil genius", Freud disapproved of Severn’s work and had her influence expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream. In this book, Rachman draws on years of research into Severn to present a much needed reappraisal of her life and work, as well as her contribution to modern psychoanalysis. Arnold Rachman’s re-discovery, restoration and analysis of the Elizabeth Severn Papers – including previously unpublished interviews, books, brochures and photographs – suggests that, far from a failure, that the analysis of Severn by Ferenczi constitutes one of the great cases in psychoanalysis, one that was responsible a new theory and methodology for the study and treatment of trauma disorder, in which Severn played a pioneering role. Elizabeth Severn should be of interest to any psychoanalyst looking to glean fresh light on Severn’s progressive views on clinical empathy, self-disclosure, countertransference analysis, intersubjectivity and the origins of relational analysis.

This book expands the symbols of the phallus and vagina into cosmic symbols, not by reference to myths but by his interpretations of embryonic, physiological, psychological facts. It develops the view that the whole of life is determined by a tendency to return to the womb, equating the process of birth with the phylogenetic transition of animal life from water to land, and linking coitus to the idea of "thalassal regression": "the longing for the sea-life from which man emerged to primeval times".

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