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The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi:

Introductory and methodological considerations

Franco Borgogno

To cite this article: Franco Borgogno (2016) The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi:
Introductory and methodological considerations, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 25:4,
214-219, DOI: 10.1080/0803706X.2016.1219053

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2016.1219053

Published online: 20 Sep 2016.

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International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2016
Vol. 25, No. 4, 214–219, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2016.1219053

The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi: Introductory and

methodological considerations

FRANCO BORGOGNO

Abstract
Reflecting in the present paper on the legitimacy of a work to collect together the ideas, concepts, and terms of Sándor
Ferenczi, the author will explore, through a series of questions and answers, the following points: why it is so clear-cut
that Ferenczi should be included in the company of those great psychoanalytic authors who might be deemed entitled to
such a study; whether Ferenczi possessed his own language, and if this was the case, when and how he acquired it; what
we mean when we refer to Ferenczi’s idiomatic language, and how we can profitably identify this language and bring it
into focus; how, in practice, such a text should be organized; what its audience and function would be; and how it would
be used by readers and students of Ferenczi.

Key words: Sándor Ferenczi, Ferenczian psychoanalytic terms and words, history of psychoanalytic thought, psychoanalysis as a
journey.

The need to publish a work that collects together the
ideas, concepts, and terms of an author (whether we
call it a “dictionary,” a “glossary,” a “lexicon,” or
“the language of”) emerges as we identify the pres-
ence of a noteworthy body of thought or knowledge
and of a specific set of terminology in connection
with it. In our own field – in addition, naturally, to
studies of this kind dedicated to Freud (as the
founder of psychoanalysis) – Jung and subsequently
the European psychoanalysts Klein, Winnicott,
Bion, and Lacan have all been deemed to merit
such volumes, although Adler and Sullivan would
surely also be more than worthy candidates on the
basis of their role in promoting psychoanalysis in
Europe and North America.
Going a little further to consider others who have
not only possessed a specific body of thought and
knowledge, but have also, like the above-mentioned
authors, brought about a turning point in psychoana-
lysis, we should, limiting ourselves to the first gener-
ations of psychoanalysts in Europe, name at least
Anna Freud. Moving to North America, we should
doubtless, if we consider the beginnings of the
spread of psychoanalysis across the Atlantic, cite
“Ego-Psychology” (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein,
Rapaport, and so on), together with Karen Horney,
Clara Thompson (a pupil of Ferenczi), and Fromm,
then, moving a little forward in time, Erikson, and
then later still Kohut’s “Self-Psychology” and Kern-
berg’s antagonistic response to this.
Passing now to Ferenczi, we would immediately
state our opinion that he too is clearly a worthy
subject for such a study (attempts of this kind have,
indeed, already been made by Stanton, 1991, Anto-
nelli, 1997, and Kahtuni & Sanches, 2009). We feel
justified in this assertion because we deem Ferenczi’s
thought and knowledge to be in no way less signifi-
cant than that of the authors mentioned above, and
because, even though it was not to Ferenczi’s liking
to present his concepts-ideas within a systematic
structure (these often being mere flash-images,
associations, sensations–impressions–intuitions, or
analogies), his unique expressive style and deep devo-
tion for the themes discussed and for psychoanalysis
itself are unparalleled in our field.
In Ferenczi’s case, moreover, we are justified in
taking such a line by Freud himself, in as much as
Freud’s obituary of Ferenczi describes this latter as
a master, not just as a pupil: a master – Freud
(1933) writes – not only of all other psychoanalysts,
but also of Freud himself. Freud reserved this kind
of recognition for very few – even, perhaps for no
other, if we think of the intensity with which he
assigns it to the friend and colleague with whom he

Correspondence: Professor Franco Borgogno, Via Cavour 46, 10123 Torino, Italy. E-mail: franco.borgogno@unito.it

(Received 29 June 2016; accepted 26 July 2016)

© 2016 The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies

had shared “an intimate community of life, feelings
and interests” (Freud & Ferenczi, 1920–1933, F/
Fer, January 11, 1933).
On the legitimacy of such a study: Three
questions
Let us now proceed by addressing a series of ques-
tions, geared towards supporting our thesis regarding
the legitimacy of a work collecting together Ferenc-
zian ideas, concepts, and terms. The first of these
questions is, “Why is it so clear-cut that Ferenczi
should be included in the company of great psychoanalytic
authors who might be deemed entitled to such a study?”
First, we would state that this is because Ferenczi’s
oeuvre is no less rich and complex than those of the
other authors cited thus far. Unlike the work of
many of these authors, however, the richness and
complexity of Ferenczi’s writings lies not in the
degree of homogeneity and coherence attained, but
rather in the experiential journey that he has under-
gone within himself and within psychoanalysis. This
is what makes Ferenczi’s oeuvre unique, as summed
up so brilliantly by Granoff (1958) when he wrote
that if Freud invented psychoanalysis, it was Ferenczi
who put it into practice, becoming its incarnation and
testing ground.
Having said this, if we dwell a little longer on the
principal characteristics of Ferenczi’s works, we
should specify that, if he gradually builds up his
oeuvre after his meeting with Freud and on the basis
of his clinical experience, the writer and author
Ferenczi can already be traced in his “pre-analytic
writings” (1899–1908), those from before his first
contact with psychoanalysis (Lorin, 1983; Mészáros,
1991; Sabourin, 1985).
Even then, his curious and indomitable explorer’s
spirit is, de facto, clearly evident – that spirit which,
never satisfied with ideological abstractions and easy
solutions, would lead him to become a “present-day
doubting Thomas,” wanting to feel for himself the
veracity of Freud’s proposals and to address himself
to the reformulation of the nascent discipline of psy-
choanalysis in a direction more consonant with its
basic spirit (Borgogno, 1999).
In this regard, we need only consider the fact that
the leitmotif that recurs right across Ferenczi’s
oeuvre is his focus on the distinctive traits of the per-
sonality and the suffering of each individual patient,
1
Even though, we must say, speaking of the unconscious human “psychological factors” in the “individual treatment” of that which is living (Ferenczi, 1933b,
p. 438), Ferenczi attributes to Freud, in a manner consistent with a reciprocity of dialogue that is in truth wholly Ferenczian, the statement that “every human
being” is “a physician” and “every physician a human being” (p. 442). Because of this, if we listen to Fromm (1935), who wrote that Ferenczi was indeed creating
a psychoanalytic alternative to Freud, the paper “Freud’s influence on medicine” would surely resound as nothing more than a fantasy of acceptance (P. Rud-
nytsky, personal communication, Spring 2016).
The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi 215
and on the limitations, short-fallings, and difficulties
of those who care for them (be they doctors or psy-
choanalysts) in a professional context – on what he
defines in The clinical diary as the “sins” of psycho-
analysts (insufficient listening-and-attention to our
patients and to the analyst’s verbal and non-verbal
communications), including first of all his own (Fer-
enczi, 1932).
We might add at this point, with a view to what we
are going to say about Ferenczi’s language, that Fer-
enczi never dreamt of creating a psychoanalysis
alternative to that of Freud, and never declared
himself a dissident intending to establish a new
school. Proof of this can be found in the fact that,
having attained a position of rather painful indepen-
dence from Freud in his final works, The clinical
diary and Notes and fragments (1920), Ferenczi none-
theless continued to eulogize “Freud’s influence on
medicine” (1933b), showing himself to be a
“classic” psychoanalyst.1
The second question on which I wish to reflect is,
“Did Ferenczi possess his own language, and if this was
the case, when and how did he acquire it?” To
answer this question, we should first reflect on Fer-
enczi’s autonomy from and dependence on Freud
and his consequent (surely in part neurotic) ambiva-
lence as a disciple towards his master. As this ground
has already been well covered in the literature
(Haynal, 2001), we will leave it aside here and
address another issue that we deem more pregnant.
Before introducing this issue, however, we would
highlight once more that, even when Ferenczi
responded to Freud’s request that he become presi-
dent of the International Psychoanalytic Association
by saying that the only presidency he could assume
in that period was over his own thoughts – the only
children he was still able to produce (Freud & Fer-
enczi, 1920–1933, from May 12, 1932 to January
11, 1933), he nonetheless continued to evince a
(not necessarily neurotic) yearning that he might
reconcile Freud’s distant and antithetical approach
with the psychoanalytic trend he himself had
founded, since besides anything else Freud remained
for him the cornerstone of psychoanalysis.
Coming now to the point to which we referred
above, of particular note is Ferenczi’s propensity
right from the beginning to pay heed to the voice of
the other before his own (Vida, 1997), because for
Ferenczi it is always the patient who knows most
about his own condition – more than even the most
216 F. Borgogno
enlightened, well-equipped mind specialist (as the
case of Rosa K teaches; Ferenczi, 1902).
This is the very objective that Ferenczi pursued
through his analyses, which sought, as he recalls,
“to loosen” the patient’s “tongue” (Ferenczi,
1933a, p. 166) and to defend his “capacity for produ-
cing his own material” (Ferenczi, 1931, p. 134).
These are, as we know, often difficult to bring into
motion and articulate due to inadequacies in nurtur-
ing and education marked by pressures of a narcissis-
tic nature or more commonly by the mandates
imposed by the (authoritarian and hypocritical, if
we think of the time in which Ferenczi himself grew
up) hegemonic culture of origin.
It was with these intrusions from and extractions
resulting from nurturing and education (which he
deemed “suggestive” in nature; Ferenczi, 1908) that
Ferenczi grappled, without being fully aware of
how, through this struggle, he sought to free himself
of the chains imposed upon him by his family and
by the psychoanalytic community within which he
was developing – restrictions which, incidentally,
taking advantage of the need that children and
pupils have to be loved and approved of, had encour-
aged him to relinquish his own voice, rather than
favoring its emancipation.
Yet apart from this, we should address two other
points. The first regards the fact that it usually takes
a long time for an individual to attain to his own
voice and language, along the road to adulthood
and also in the scientific-professional domain. In
both of these situations, one must inevitably first
master the language of others by learning from and
imitating other voices before coming to possess a
language and a voice of one’s own.
The second concerns the fact that Ferenczi was a
creative soul who was ahead of his time and, as is
often the case with such individuals, was inexorably
alone in pursuing his idiosyncratic research and did
not receive the support that would have enabled
him to recognize the merit and soundness of what
he was expressing. At the end of his life, therefore,
Ferenczi would eventually have to seek out an affir-
mation of this merit and soundness in his patients,
such as RN (Elizabeth Severn), the understanding
of psychic processes and events that he had attained
being far beyond the grasp of his colleagues and
especially of Freud himself.
Consequently, Ferenczi’s slowness in appropriat-
ing a language felt to be his own and worthy of
respect is, in sum, also physiological and is due not
exclusively to an excessive personal slackening stem-
ming from an affective immaturity but rather to his
(self-)critical character as a scholar. Besides, Ferenczi
also died too early, precisely when all that he had
intuited and pursued from the outset of his career
was on the point of coagulating and condensing
into a more solid and homogeneous form of
expression, able to foreground his original vision.
Although we obviously cannot know what would
have happened had Ferenczi lived longer, if we
peruse his career we cannot but conclude that he
would surely have continued to ask himself questions
and to review his own clinical-theoretical theses. In
addition – by no means wishing to belittle the
emotive turbulence of The clinical diary and the late
Notes and fragments – his constant making and
unmaking of his thought might have been gradually
attenuated, facilitating a surer and more
balanced conceptualization that would have allowed
him to continue to doubt while also finding a
greater degree of reconciliation with himself and his
mentors.
Our next question is, “But what do we mean when we
refer to Ferenczi’s idiomatic language, and how can we
profitably identify this language and bring it into
focus?” To answer this, we should at once state, as
we have already implied between the lines of the
present reflection, that Ferenczi’s idiomatic language
should not only be understood as the new terminol-
ogy at which he arrived towards the end of his life,
when he began to propose a metapsychology and a
cure for trauma that diverged significantly from
those proposed by Freud.
Indeed, many other terms that arose directly from
or in connection with Freud, with common sense,
with the medicine and the psychiatry of the time, or
with other sciences and fields such as biology, horti-
culture/agriculture, zoology, botany, religion,
mythology, mathematics, social psychology,
geology, chemistry/mineralogy, ethology, esoteri-
cism, sexology, physics, and so on, can also be
ascribed to Ferenczi. All these are terms that
became Ferenczian as a result of the autochthonous
way in which he applied them and of the peculiar
mental and emotional attitude with which he
inflected them, modifying their usual application
without, often, being himself aware of the conspicu-
ous shiftings or alterations in meaning that he was
producing and promoting.
We might then suggest that, in general, Ferenczi
proceeded by grafting his own specific intuitions on
to the originary psychoanalytic plant, on to other
areas of human knowledge, or even on to the
current usage of the language. These graftings can
doubtless be attributed to his own inclination
towards a theoretical-technical “amphimixis” (Anto-
nelli, 1997) or to his poetic soul, which frequently
made recourse to linguistic nuances, analogies, or
other processes of figurability.
Many of these terms, furthermore, frequently fall
short of a theoretically-clinically articulate fullness

and often remain in a nascent state, perhaps emerging
and re-emerging on numerous occasions across Fer-
enczi’s work before locating themselves in a more
wide-reaching vision recognizable as his own.
Herein incidentally – in the fact that Ferenczi does
not always sign off on and acknowledge his own con-
tributions – lies the reason why it has been so easy
(and this still remains the case) to plunder Ferenczi’s
works without the theft being recognized and without
the stolen ideas being traced back to their owner.
Naming “thieves” (knowing or otherwise) should,
incidentally, be one of our aims in the study we are
proposing.
All of this leads us to conclude that a work on Fer-
enczi’s language should by no means limit itself to
listing and providing clear definitions of the terms
he used. It should instead concentrate on the
history of each term and on the multiple meanings
that it may have assumed across his writings, outlin-
ing not only the distinct uses that he often uncon-
sciously made of them, but also the changes and
differences that, although often masked by a
nominal continuity, can be seen to express a radical
change in Ferenczi’s way of thinking that he himself
did not fully perceive at the moment of its emergence.
In order to bring to light each term, bearing in
mind its originary matrix and complex development,
it would therefore appear essential both to bring out
the experiential context and the problematics from
which it stemmed and grew in importance, and to
indicate its interconnectedness with the other terms
that have accompanied and oriented its progressive
emergence, eventually in some cases becoming the
pillar on which the ideative construction rests.
In this approach, then, each term should be
accompanied by the history through which it
acquired its value in Ferenczi’s oeuvre, cross-fertiliz-
ing with other similar or divergent terms, and
should, at the same time, be framed within the thera-
peutic context with which Ferenczi was faced and the
issues to which he was responding. This should also
be adopted for that group of decidedly newer words
and ideas at which he arrived between 1927 and
1933, such as those related to the field of trauma
and its cure (discussed above) and, to provide a
further example, those concerning the family’s adap-
tation to the child.
The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi 217
In addition, these latter terms and concepts did not
crop up all of a sudden but came from afar (from Fer-
enczi’s first steps as a psychoanalyst and even as a psy-
chiatrist) and are the fruit of a long incubation-
gestation. A failure to reveal the minute details of
this would impoverish our knowledge of Ferenczi’s
experience, not permitting us to savor all the
uneven and tormented preconscious “long wave” of
thought that gradually brought them to the fore-
ground in his clinical approach and teachings. This
journey and this long wave constitute, as we will
never tire of repeating, the locus from which Ferenc-
zi’s true value as a psychoanalyst and as a psychoana-
lytical writer has its origins.
The organization, meaning, and usability of
the work in question
Having thus discussed the legitimacy of producing a
work that collects the ideas, concepts, and terms
used by Ferenczi and, specifically, of a study of this
author’s language, let us now swiftly consider
“How, in practice, should such a text should be orga-
nized?” We will then consider some final reflections
on “the audience and function of such a work and its
usability for readers and students of Ferenczi.”
As far as its organization is concerned, for now we
would only state that the work would be entitled “The
clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi” and that we
imagine it would be divided into two sections. The
first part would consist of an in-depth historical and
critical examination of the various fields2 that Fer-
enczi hoed, turned over, fertilized, and seeded. It
would be furnished with ample citations and textual
references so as to bring to light the clinical-theoreti-
cal implications of each – results that others have not
infrequently claimed as their own. The second part,
which would be something more like a dictionary or
glossary, would collect the terms and concepts
together in alphabetical order, providing a succinct
definition and description of each that would take
into account the semantic changes undergone as Fer-
enczi’s thought evolved.3
With regard to its meaning, and in connection with
what we have already outlined here, a study focused
on language should be, to our mind, first and fore-
most an “act of restitution and redemption”

2
The areas that we have in mind, beyond those already mentioned concerning “traumatogenesis, the many faces of trauma and the curability of complex post-
traumatic consequences” and the “family’s adaptation to the child,” are as follows: “improper and insufficient coupling: premature ejaculation and the interpret-
ation”; “suggestion, suggestibility and the pragmatics of communication”; “introjection and its processes”; “the repercussions of communications and non-com-
munications between analyst and patient”; “resistance, negative therapeutic reaction and narcissistic counter-transference”; “the birth and the evolutionary
stages of the Ego”; “children, the infantile and primitive anxieties and defenses”; “contributions to classic psychoanalytic technique”; “Ferenczi’s technical exper-
imentation and its phases”; “elasticity of technique and tact”; “the various meanings of dreams and their interpretation”; “the confusion of tongues between
adults and the child”; “the qualities of the good-enough analyst”; “the sins of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts”; “the language of the body and somatic mem-
ories”; “male and female”; and “narcissism-socialism/egotism-altruism/autocracy-universalism.”
3
Seeing as at least a hundred terms already spring to mind, I will not list them here.
218 F. Borgogno
towards an author who spent his life enabling his
patients to express themselves in their own voices.
In this, he was willing himself to fall into the
background and silence his own voice every time
he believed this to be necessary to his analyses or
to his service to Freud and the psychoanalytic
establishment.
Finally, as far as its uses are concerned, in as much
as it aims to allow Ferenczi’s voice to emerge in all its
facets (all its elements of fortissimo and pianissimo),
even where it did not have the time to organize
itself into an audibly coherent and complete system,
we believe that such a study would help anybody
interested in Ferenczi’s thought to arrive at a “biogra-
phy” of his ideas and concepts. This would permit
those who, for whatever reason, are unable to
explore his oeuvre from the beginning to the end to
obtain some sense of and to follow from close up
those often turbulent vicissitudes by which he was
afflicted as he sought to handle psychic events and
take them into his care.
Although this is no replacement for reading the
original texts (which should preferably be read in a
historical-chronological order, as I have, for many
years, been recommending as the best way to
approach all psychoanalytic authors), such a work
should nonetheless help the reader and the scholar
of Ferenczi to gain a broader vision of the thematic
areas that accompanied the progressive development
of his thought. On the one hand, it would avoid, the
danger of a fragmentary reading (which is what
would happen if it consisted in nothing but a glos-
sary, which, as we know, would tend to a detail-
focused knowledge). On the other hand, it would
offer the possibility to consider the various steps
that marked Ferenczi’s clinical endeavor together
with his thinking on each as his psychoanalytic
experience gradually matured. Ultimately, it would
serve as a kind of map and compass along the fasci-
nating journey of discovery that is to be made into
Ferenczi’s world and into the rich and complex
heritage that he has bequeathed to us. Last but not
least, it would act as a source of new insights on
which we could draw in our everyday analytic
activities.
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Author
Franco Borgogno is full professor of clinical
psychology at the University of Turin, and a
training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psycho-
analytical Society (SPI). He is author of many papers
published in different languages and journals, and of
The clinical language of Sándor Ferenczi 219
the following main books: Psychoanalysis as a journey,
The Vancouver interview, and The girl who committed
hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays.
Together with Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino
Coe, he recently edited Reading Italian psychoanalysis
(Routledge, 2016). In 2010, he was the recipient of
the M. Sigourney Award.