Ferenczi's Thalassal Trend, The Evolution of Tears and the Role of Affect in the Psychosomatic Relation (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Problem of Heredity: Ferenczi's Organology and the Politics of Bioanalysis
Psychoanalysis and History 24(2) 2022, 2022
At the beginning of the First World War, Sándor Ferenczi drafted a first version of his theory of genitality, which was to be published in 1924 under the title Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (in English: Thalassa). Here, he theorizes not only genitality, but the genitals themselves. With the morphology of reproductive organs as a point of departure, Thalassa takes us through time and space, speculating that the physiological side of genitality must be understood as the belated abreaction of a series of phylogenetic catastrophes. This contribution offers a new frame for reading Thalassa, challenging the common perception that the phylogenetic speculation in Ferenczi and Freud sought to provide psychoanalysis with a natural scientific foundation. Instead, Ferenczi deconstructs precisely such foundational claims: he reads his sources from nineteenth-century popular biology against the grain and draws upon diverging psychoanalytic notions of hysteria to destabilize popular evolutionary narratives. Read against the backdrop of its time, Ferenczian ‘bioanalysis’ holds the potential for a political intervention against biologism and eugenic thought. His methodology breaks with the dream of a transparent language in what is today called the hard sciences.
Abstract The later work of Sándor Ferenczi was awash with salt-water inquiry that arises out of the oceanic depths of the Thalassal Trend. The purpose of this chapter is, through a poetics of water, to illuminate the property of salt water and wonder as Ferenczi did about its relationship to human evolution through a reading of amphimixis, and the evolution of tears, the latter engaging the work of Elaine Morgan. We are particularly interested in the clinical presentation of phylogenetic or thalassal regression, as reported in his germinal work: Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924), and later works including The Clinical Diary (1933) and what the contemporary multi-disciplinary (particularly ficto-critical) application of such ideas might mean.
Evolutionary Water: Wombs, Seas, Tears and their Utraquistic Relation
Altitude e-journal , 2011
"This article explores the evolution of water as charted by earlier scientific and more recent multidisciplinary inquiry. Its value lies in its scientific parallel to mythic water, creation and the maternal, through disavowed Greek mythic water deity Metis and how her absence from dominant discourse may have inadvertently influenced current evolutionary theory. This paper demonstrates crossovers and tensions between the disciplines of hard science through the work of Charles Darwin, particularly The Descent of Man (1859), and feminist humanities through the work of Elaine Morgan. It also elucidates psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of utraquism at the biological and evolutionary level, as a methodological tool. Darwin does not refute that life began in the sea, but what is missing in his account is what happened after the amoeba migrated to land, and how human beings evolved from this simple life form. Or did they? Further, I consider the work of tears and their inter-relationship to biology, affect and emotion."
Elasticity of technique: the psychoanalytic project and the trajectory of Ferenczi's life
American journal of psychoanalysis, 2001
The object of this paper is the Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique in the work of Sándor Ferenczi. The author sustains that this can be considered neither as an ultimate arrival point nor as a particular stage of Ferenczi's clinical-theoretical body of work, but rather as an ensemble of affective qualities, attitudes and values, which he gradually developed through experience, signalling a paradigm shift in the history of psychoanalysis. The following areas will be explored: the new sensitivity demonstrated by Ferenczi concerning the relational and communicative factors present in the analytic session, his subtle and acute attention to the participation of the analyst's own subjectivity in the therapeutic process, and how these enduring elements of Ferenczi's technique anticipate several significant future developments in psychoanalysis.
Blood, Sweat and Tears - The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, 2000
It has been consistently pointed out in the research literature that his own experience of interminable suffering would have led Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) to develop ‘premature religious leanings’ during his later childhood and early adolescence. But it is less well known that Herder’s university studies had first taken him to the Medical Faculty of Koenigsberg, where he sought to gather knowledge about his own illness and possible remedies. Because he could not cope with the circumstances of the dissection course, he had to abandon his classes in medicine and instead changed to studying theology and philosophy. As Herder’s unpublished ‘Blue Book’ shows, he closely followed Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) exposé of the mathematical and physical sciences and developed his own interpretations on contemporary physiology – notably of Albrecht von Haller’s (1708–1777) ‘Elementa physiologiae’ – to which Herder juxtaposed his own considerations of the meaning of ‘tears’ for the human condition.
Trauma theory in Sándor Ferenczi's writings of 1931 and 1932
The author states that it is Ferenczi’s writings of 1931 and 1932 that exhibit the most conspicuous departures from Freud’s ideas and at the same time contain Ferenczi’s most original contributions. The texts concerned – Confusion of tongues between adults and the child (Ferenczi, 1932a), the Clinical Diary (Dupont, 1985), and some of the Notes and fragments (Ferenczi, 1930–32), all of which were published posthumously – present valuable and original theories on trauma which are significant not only in historical terms but also because the ideas concerned are relevant to our conception of clinical psychoanalysis today. The aim of this paper is to give an account of Ferenczi’s trauma theory as it emerges from his writings of 1931–32 and to specify the points on which he differs from Freud.
2001
in Anthropological Journal on European Cultures. VI: 2 ('Reflecting Cultural Practice'). Frankfurt, GDR.. March 1998. ISSN 0960 0604 pp. 79-107 and forthcoming in German as “Radikaler Empirismus. Anthropologische Feldarbeit im Gefolge von Psychoanalyse und Annee sociologique in Der Andere Schauplatz: Psychoanalyse-Kultur-Medien (Series IFK Materialien), ed. Marie-Luise Angerer and Henry Krips. Vienna: Viennese Böhlau Verlag. 2001. pp.