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| The author and Qtmir, Liverpool |
I have given up attempting to form a study cartel devoted to the various revisions Ferenczi and Lacan made to their psychoanalytic projects.
Groups and Cartels
A cartel is a lacanian invention. It was a small study group with a facilitator that lasted a limited period of time and then stopped. Afterwards members were encouraged to join another study group devoted to a different or similar topic. Lacan had learned from Bion that groups regularly become dysfunctional, cease working for a while at least, and even pursue totally different objectives from those adopted at the outset. Lacan cut out these diversions by giving his groups a limited time frame that was non-negotiable. In reality however, Lacan's cartels often had a limited membership drawn from his followers. Although topics changed and cartels ended, membership could never be completely fresh but only ever recycled. Eventually Lacan avoided dysfunctional group dynamics, ideologies, rivalries, and analytical prima-donnas by closing the organisations he founded. From the short-session, to the brief cartel, and series of abandoned Schools, Lacan's social and psychoanalytic formations would never produce rival masters.... or indeed any magister whatsoever. In this Ferenczi anticipated him:
I know the excrescences that grow from organized groups, and I am aware that in most political, social, and scientific organizations childish megalomania, vanity, admiration of empty formalities, blind obedience, or personal egoism, prevail instead of quiet, honest work in the general interests
But even the venerable founders of psychoanalysis failed to establish any working group that catered to the "general interests" of psychoanalysis alone. Instead there arose complicated factions, splits, secessions, excommunications to name but a few group phenomena arising within psychoanalysis. In short the notion of "a working group" remained part ideal, part fantasy.
So now I begin my idiosyncratic cartel for one devoted to Sandor Ferenczi's experiments with mutual analysis. These started in the 1930's when he was already a very well established figure in international psychoanalysis and leader of an influential group of analysts and doctors in Hungry. The three most important texts documenting this experiment arehis Clinical Diary, the voluminous Correspondence with Sigmund Freud, and finally a text by the other party to the experiment, Elizabeth Severn, called The Discovery of the Self: A Study in Psychological Cure.
Was The Cure failing?
The immediate background to Ferenzci's experiments comprises of three weighty factors. First of all there is what Freud called Ferenzci's "mania" for curing to which he gave a Latin epithet, furor sanandi. There was international recognition for Ferenczi being analyst of last resort. He would invariably accept analysands that had been failed, dismissed, or deemed "incurable" by other contemporaries. Not without a certain amount of self-irony the analyst himself once referred to his own "super-performances" ! His reputation matched that of his physician friend Georg Groddeck, who was also noted for accepting patients deemed incurable by physicians and alienists alike.
Though Ferenczi might occasionally conduct analyses by correspondence, he preferred to see patients face to face. Moving to Budapest was an option available to the rich and desperate only, so this in itself was effectively a criterion for selection or exclusion. A notable exception was Melanie Klein who was already living in Budapest from 1910. She herself reported
My interests in psycho-analysis and in the analysis of children arose
during the time when I lived in Budapest. By that time I already had
three children. I had come across [‘some’ deleted and replaced in pen
by ‘one’] of Freud’s books and was deeply impressed by [‘them’ deleted
and replaced in pen by ‘it’]. I was analysed by Sandor Ferenczi, and it
soon became clear that I was very much drawn to understand more of the
inner life first of all of my own children, and then of children in general.
Ferenczi told me that I was gifted for this particular, and at that time
still very little developed, branch of psycho-analysis (See the Autobiography of Melanie Klein in https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2013_Klein_autobiography___Janet_Sayers_transcription.pdf)
Klein here judiciously glossed over her own therapeutic needs of the time. Since 1908 she sought contemporary fashionable "cures" for her nerves, depressions, bladder problems, and post-natal conditions. Klein needed regular periods away from her children in order to rest and recover. It was following the birth of her third child that she turned to Ferenczi for analysis in 1914. Klein didn't have to travel. She happened to be at the right place at the right time to benefit from five years of therapy with him. Even then five years of psychoanalysis was a long-term treatment, compared with the much briefer treatments of the first generation hysterics or Freuds impromptu, ad hoc, training analyses.
Alongside his passion for healing analytic incurables, two further factors pushed the Hungarian analyst's experiments in mutual analysis and other techniques. Suspicions began to circulate amongst psychoanalytic communities after 1918 that eventually shook the foundations of Freud's psychoanalytic cure One was an anxiety that freudian sublimation had become less effective or even completely useless. Freud witnessed many of his earliest clients surrender or forget their neurotic tangles when they found some demanding social role. Anna O. for instance, who invented psychoanalysis along with Breuer and Freud, eventually became a pioneer in women's social work. After 1918 this form of sublimation seemed less attractive, particularly to women.
Another worry had an equally dramatic impact on psychoanalysts. This was the rumour that psychoanalytic "interpretation" had become less effective in clinics. Analysts of course continued interpreting the dreams, words, behaviours, and even the transferences of their patients; yet sadly these interpretations often led to no corresponding "mutative response" from clients. In other words patients remained stubbornly neurotic, however hard or frequently analysts might attempt to interpret their dreams, behaviours, or transferences.
Many post-Freudian developments occurring during the inter-war years originated to address the apparent failures of both sublimation and interpretation. Correspondingly, what was originally designed to be a quick cure, analogous to a few modern counselling sessions, became progressively longer; lasting years instead of weeks or months. The costs of analytic listening inflated in tandem. This is the sitz-im-leben for all Ferenczi's work: his restless experiments with technique and frequent theoretical revisionism, though he was certainly not the only one to harbour doubts about the effectiveness cure. Whereas debates about the effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatment and techniques were largely undercover, confined to internal debates, Ferenzci boldly went public with his doubts, struggles, and continuing efforts to revise and reinvent psychoanalytic treatment for new generations.
Ferenzci himself acknowledged mutual analysis to be exhausting and demanding. He did not recommend it as a "technique" available to all clinicians. Rather it was an exceptional adaptation forced upon him by a set of particular circumstances. He openly admitted learning from this adaptation, but it was a costly process that ultimately failed. During the final years of his life Ferenczi was battling with pernicious anaemia that eventually forced him to abandon his clinic. When the eight year enterprise with RN (Elizabeth Severn) finally ceased, she moved to Paris in a distressed state to receive alternative support from her daughter Margaret, a dancer. Eventually Elizabeth moved to London and practised as a therapist there, whilst remaining determinedly aloof from all psychoanalytic groups and organisations there. Had she wished to practice as what was then called "a lay analyst" there were more opportunities available for that in London than in her native USA where the psychoanalytic profession had become closed to all but medics. As her daughter once acknowledged, Elizabeth was always a one woman band who had very limited tolerance for colleagues.
For Debate
1. Psyche/Soma: Pernicious Aenemia
What is the influence of serious illness on psychoanalytic practice? The Clinical Diary is testament to the final struggles of an increasingly sick man. Various contemporaries, like Abraham, had died, and leadership was already passing on to a new generation. Freud himself had been forced to reduce work because of cancer. Ferenzci, though taking more rests and holidays than usual, continued to engage fully in what he called "the problems" of psychoanalysis until he succumbed to pernicious anaemia, which some analysts unscrupulously misrepresented as psychotic depression.
How then does the presence of a terminal illness, in either analysts or analsyands, impact psychoanalytic treatment? A question of weighty significance in view of Freud's conviction that the unconscious offers neither space nor time to the concept of its own extinction
2. What was "schizophrenia progressiva"
RN the person for whom mutual analysis was designed, received a weighty diagnosis in a diary entry for January 2nd 1932. She was believed to be suffering from an illness which resulted in a permanent psychotic state; so why risk psychoanalysis with an already fragmented and fragile person?
3. What were the limitations of mutual analysis?
4. Unsuccessful and Messy Endings with Ferenzci
Notes
1. I began this writing in the July of 2025 aged 73. For decades I struggled with generalised arthritis and during the July of 2024 I received a second knee replacement. Simultaneously I was undergoing a divorce which involved court appearances online and regular threats of imprisonment whilst recovering from surgery and relinquishing my treasured retirement home on the banks of the River Dee. If this was not enough, toward the end of July 2024 I was told tests had found secondary cancer despite successful treatment by radiation and hormone therapy a decade ago. I therefore acknowledge that July 2024-July 2025 was a time of sickness, social dislocation, and more threats by aggressive lawyers more interested in escalating fees than any form of justice or equity.
2. Although "self analysis" has an honourable tradition since Freud, it inevitably suffered from the stigma of being idiosyncratic and delusional. In the theocratical language of Freud, self-analysis invariably teetered on the borders of "wild analysis' -despite the fact that Freud himself was the original wild analyst who found it extremely difficult to remain friendly with a whole series of colleagues including Ferenczi himself and Georg Groddeck, the famous physician and the inventor of the unconscious Id (das Es). See The Ferenczi-Groddeck Letters, 1921-1933 Open Gate Press 2002.
3. Psychoanlytic sublimation, like every other technical term in psychoanalysis, is a multifaceted concept. In Freud's earliest practice, his middle and upper-class patients exchanged neurotic, sexualised preoccupations for activities with a practical social role. Of course intellectual achievements, particularly literature and art, involved sublimation in Freud's theories, but for individuals eager for the cure before 1914 social sublimation remained the most privileged avenue to escape neurosis available to both men and women.
4. Lacan offered one of the most important revisions of Freud's concept. Already a qualified doctor and psychiatrist, he began a training analysis lasting from1932 until 1938. These were precisely the years when psychoanalysts became increasingly worried about the effectiveness of interpretation and sublimation. His own theoretical proposal involved crafting an ethics for psychoanalysis whilst simultaneously offering analysands and followers with powerful avenues for intellectual sublimation in his constantly evolving theory along with a battery of changeable concepts invented and sanctioned by himself. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 exists in a variety of French texts and English translations.
5. An excellent summary of the mural analysis between Severn and Ferenczi is offered by Berlin Psychoanalytic on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ_ytqz_qAM.
6 . The website of the Pernicious Aneamia Society says People who have been diagnosed as having Pernicious Anaemia will be unable to absorb Vitamin B12 from food.4 Until the 1920’s when it was discovered that feeding patients raw, or very lightly cooked liver could keep them alive patients died from the disease. Injectable ‘artificial’ B12 became available after the Second World War and now, as long as the diagnosis is made, people seldom die of the disease. Once the Vitamin B12 Deficiency is corrected patients can live a more or less normal life. However, a great many people still have problems with symptoms after the deficiency has been corrected though doctors don’t know why this is so.
7. This quotation is from the first volume of the translated Correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi p xxiv
8. A modern woman writes about living with pernicious anaemia. In modern times, Linda born in 1961, tells her own story about pernicious anaemia.
I’ve always been active – cycling, swimming, and a physically demanding job kept me fit. Then, the subtle changes began. In 2015 I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency and was prescribed vitamin D. Around 2016, I noticed a decline in my health. Fatigue crept in, headaches became frequent, and I felt increasingly clumsy. I visited my GP, attributing it to stress and the menopause, which was definitely the trigger for me. But the symptoms worsened: Visual disturbances: lots of problems with my prescription glasses and eyesight. Unexplained falls: Upstairs, downstairs, even on flat pavements. Cognitive fog: Forgetting everyday things, like where I kept my plates.Intense fatigue: Like I’d worked a gruelling night shift, even after minimal activity. Despite my concerns, I was dismissed by my GP with suggestions of stress management and yoga. I tried to do more as exercise as I felt unfit but my life was grim with lots of symptoms.
The turning point was a severe fall in 2018. I hit my head hard, and the fatigue became unbearable. I then had a second neurological event in October when, reaching up in the garden, I had a dizzy spell. I went to go indoors but staggered, felt as if I was being pulled down to the right and had to fall into a bush; I was then unable to get up and was worried that I had had a stroke. Following this I experienced dizziness, a first serious attack of vertigo, and even migraines – something I’d never had before...........The initial shock was immense. How could this have happened to me? I ate a balanced diet, including plenty of meat and dairy. With hindsight the way the symptoms crept up on me felt like a rope pulling me backwards. I had tried hard to explain to friends and health care professionals, but I just wasn’t listened to. I became irritable, scatty and felt detached from the world, personality traits I had never experienced before. I was offered anti-depressants which I refused even though my mood was low, I knew it wasn’t depression....
Ferenczi went through a similar period of illness and uncertainty.
