Sandor Ferenczi

If Emma Eckstein is the heroine of Masson’s book (and Freud its villain), then Sandor Ferenczi is its hero. The Assault on Truth ends with a long chapter on what Masson calls “The Strange Case of Ferenczi’s Last Paper.” Like the chapter on Eckstein, it attempts to lend credibility to Masson’s thesis about the seduction theory by way of an argument that is again entirely inferential. At the same time, Ferenczi becomes for Masson the central figure in his imaginary counterhistory of psychoanalysis, whose vicissitudes he traces from Freud in 1896, through Ferenczi in 1932, to his own presentation to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in 1981. Ferenczi’s paper, delivered at the Wiesbaden Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, suggests what psychoanalysis might have become had it remained faithful to Freud’s original seduction theory.

The paper, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child,” argues that real childhood seductions are more often the cause of neurosis than psychoanalysts were inclined to acknowledge. Naturally, Masson thinks Ferenczi was right in his judgment, not to mention brave in contesting the orthodox emphasis on fantasy. Masson’s subject, however, is not Ferenczi’s paper itself but Freud’s reaction to it. Masson tries to read in that reaction evidence that, even in 1932, Freud still felt ashamed about his craven abandonment of a theory he knew in his heart was correct. Ferenczi’s revival of the seduction hypothesis so threatened Freud, Masson argues, that Freud was driven to terminate their friendship. “Ferenczi’s tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all of his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he never would emerge” (148). Only Freud’s guilty inability to accept the reality of seduction explains Freud’s “otherwise mysterious turning away from Ferenczi” (xviii).

As Peter Gay has observed, the contention that Ferenczi’s revival of the seduction theory cost him Freud’s friendship is “contradicted by the facts.”^[19] Throughout the final months of his life, as Ferenczi collapsed both mentally and physically (he died May 22, 1933), Freud continued to correspond with him and his wife, and the letters display great affection as well as distress at Ferenczi’s suffering. Whatever tension the Wiesbaden paper may have introduced into the relationship, it did not cause Freud to sever his ties with the man who for many years had been his favorite disciple.

Masson, then, exaggerates when he says that Freud punished Ferenczi for reviving the seduction theory by terminating their friendship. But perhaps his hypothesis can survive without this inflated claim. Freud certainly disapproved of Ferenczi’s paper, and Ferenczi’s final years did witness an undeniable alienation between the two men, if nothing so extreme as Masson suggests. But is there anything in Freud’s response to the paper to indicate that he actually felt threatened by it—that it touched a sore spot in his conscience?

The best evidence of Freud’s reaction comes from a letter written to his daughter Anna on September 3, 1932. Four days earlier, on August 30, Ferenzci had visited Freud, who, because of his cancer, did not attend the Wiesbaden congress. Freud appears to have been more startled by Ferenczi’s manner than by what he had to say: without so much as a greeting, Ferenczi began, “I want to read you my paper,” which he proceeded to do.^[20] In his letter to Anna, Freud says that he found the presentation “confused, obscure, artificial,” but he seems mainly concerned that the paper would harm Ferenczi’s reputation.^[21] The letter, in other words, suggests that Freud felt not threatened but saddened and somewhat embarrassed for Ferenczi. Masson does not cite this letter and appears to be unaware of it, but it can be squared with his interpretation only by arguing that, even in a pri vate communication to his daughter, Freud hypocritically misrepresented his true feelings. This verges dangerously on making Freud’s guilt a matter of raw assertion, against which no evidence can prevail. Like his cowardly collapse before his Viennese colleagues more than three decades earlier, it becomes an invisible, intrapsychic event, to which Masson alone has access. In reality, Freud’s disapproval of Ferenczi’s paper is easily explained by the simple fact that Freud considered it mistaken. The idea that he not only disliked it but also “feared” (153) it is purely suppositional.

Likewise, Masson’s characterization of Freud’s “turning away” from Ferenczi as “otherwise mysterious” is unjustified. The tension between Freud and Ferenczi had important sources beyond the matter of seduction. Freud was much troubled by Ferenczi’s deviations from classical analytic technique and his introduction of a more active form of therapy. In an effort to break with what he considered the ineffective and authoritarian conventions of traditional analysis, Ferenczi had ventured on what, to Freud, was a dangerous experiment in intimacy. Freud wrote him in late 1931: “You have not made a secret of the fact that you kiss your patients and let them kiss you.” More ambitious therapists, Freud warned, would feel invited to proceed even further:

Picture what will be the result of publishing your technique. There is no revolutionary who is not driven out of the field by a still more radical one. A number of independent thinkers in matters of technique will say to themselves: why stop at a kiss? Certainly one gets further when one adopts “pawing” as well, which after all doesn’t make a baby. And then bolder ones will come along who will go further to peeping and showing—and soon we shall have accepted in the technique of analysis the whole repertoire of demiviergerie and petting parties, resulting in an enormous increase of interest in psychoanalysis among both analysts and patients. The new adherent, however, will easily claim too much of this interest for himself, the younger of our colleagues will find it hard to stop at the point they originally intended, and God the Father Ferenczi gazing at the lively scene he has created will perhaps say to himself: maybe after all I should have halted in my technique of motherly affection before the kiss.^[22]

Behind the issue of the kiss stands the fact that Freud and Ferenczi had come to occupy opposite ends of the therapeutic spectrum within psychoanalysis. Freud’s expectations for therapy were always modest. At best, he said, analysis aimed at “transforming…hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”^[23] Ferenczi permitted himself to hope for more. “The need to cure and to help had become paramount in him,” Freud wrote in his obituary notice for Ferenczi; “he had probably set himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out of reach to-day.”^[24] Such passages afford strong reason to believe that Freud’s concern over Ferenczi’s approach to therapy and its implications for Ferenczi’s state of mind was a paramount factor in Freud’s withdrawal from his beloved associate. At the very least, the existence of this ongoing therapeutic disagreement considerably weakens Masson’s claim that the tension between Freud and Ferenczi derived wholly, or even largely, from the seduction issue.

Because Masson’s attempt to use Ferenczi to substantiate Freud’s dishonorable motives in giving up the seduction theory is such a lame affair—feebler even than his earlier effort to enlist Emma Eckstein in the cause—one again suspects that Masson’s real interest in Ferenczi lies elsewhere. Ferenczi, I would suggest, occupies a significant place in Masson’s fantasy about what should have become of psychoanalysis. Contemplating Ferenczi delivering his paper in Wiesbaden, Masson slips easily into the “as-if” language of the imaginary:

Perhaps never before had anyone spoken for the abused child with such sympathy and eloquence. The ideas Freud had propounded to a skeptical medical world in his 1896 papers were here repeated, but expanded through the knowledge gained by analysis in the years after 1896. It is as if Ferenczi were demonstrating to the analytic world how psychoanalysis could have developed had Freud not abandoned the seduction hypothesis. (150)

In effect, Masson pictures Ferenczi’s paper as a kind of reenactment of Freud’s own paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” This time, however, Ferenczi corrects Freud’s error by steadfastly refusing to capitulate before a hostile audience:

It was as if Ferenczi were telling Freud: “You lacked the courage to stay with the truth and defend it. The movement that grew up around you is a product of this cowardice. I will not be a part of it. I will not break faith with what I know to be true.” And that is what happened; Ferenczi died, but he did not recant. (186)

Had psychoanalysis followed Ferenczi’s lead in 1932, the result, Masson believes, would have been a therapeutic revolution: analysts would have stopped denying their patients’ sufferings and confirmed the reality of the abuse to which those patients had been subjected. Sympathy, belief, and affection would have replaced the constipated insistence on emotional restraint and skepticism. Analytic therapy would have developed something of the loving, democratic character (although not the sexual intimacy) of Ferenczi’s “mutual analysis,” whose attractions Masson was to celebrate later in Against Therapy (1988).

But beyond this therapeutic transformation Masson also imagines Ferenczi inspiring a renaissance of the political campaign against sexual abuse that Masson so wanted Freud to launch at the end of the nineteenth century. Revealingly, Masson’s fateful presentation of his ideas about the seduction theory before a group of critical analysts in New Haven in 1981 again reenacts the original scenario. Masson was then the same age as Freud was when he gave his paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria” to the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. Masson’s account, in Final Analysis, of his own reception by those in attendance strongly echoes his account, in The Assault on Truth, of Freud’s brutal treatment at the hands of his Viennese medical colleagues in 1896. As he did with Freud, Masson stresses the “deathly silence” that followed his talk, as well as his sense of being “completely isolated” afterward.^[25] (Masson also portrayed Ferenczi, we will recall, as condemned to “an isolation from which he never would emerge.”) Like Ferenczi in 1932, Masson in 1981 both repeats and corrects Freud’s original gesture: he tells his colleagues the truth about childhood sexual abuse, and he refuses to recant. Moreover, in contrast to the ailing Ferenczi, Masson lives on to repudiate psychoanalysis entirely and become the public crusader against child abuse that Freud should have (and Ferenczi might have) been. In effect, Masson constructs an imaginary political narrative for Freud and then seeks to realize it in his own life. The sequence of embattled lecturers—1896, 1932, 1981—suggests a profound identification not only with Ferenczi but, surprisingly, with Freud himself. Thus, like Emma Eckstein, Ferenczi is first and foremost a symbolic figure for Masson: just as Eckstein is the prototypical psychoanalytic victim, so Ferenczi embodies the liberating ideological promise of Freud’s original insight. This explains his place of honor at the end of Masson’s book.