Brazil has made international headlines for the government’s inept and irresponsible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, sex worker activists have once again taken on an essential role in responding to the pandemic amidst State absences and abuses. Drawing on the theoretical framework of necropolitics, we trace the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of how prostitution and work have been (un)governed in Brazil and how this has framed sex worker activists’ responses to COVID-19. As a group of scholars and sex worker activists based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we specifically explore the idea of sex workers as “essential workers”, but also of sex work as, essentially, work, demonstrating complicities, differences, and congruencies in how sex workers see what they do and who their allies in the context of the 21st century’s greatest health crisis to date.

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In 'The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud', Volume III, Ernest Jones explained Ferenczi's final contributions as the product of a mental deterioration based on a progressive psychosis. Erich Fromm collected various testimonies by witnesses of Ferenczi's last years, all contrasting with Jones's assertions, and challenged Jones's manner of writing history. However, since Fromm was himself a dissident, and his witnesses were pupils, relatives or friends of Ferenczi's, they were discarded as 'partisans'. The present study aims at reconsidering the question of Ferenczi's insanity on the basis of many unpublished documents. The consulted documents do not support Jones's allegation of Ferenczi's insanity. At the same time, they show that Jones's allegation was not a one-man fabrication, but reflected a shared belief, eliciting many questions about the nature of this belief, the lack of scrutiny that characterised its spreading, and its possible function within the psychoanalytic community. It is suggested that Ferenczi's personality and teaching, especially his emphasis on the need to accept the patient's criticism, contrasted with the dominant conception of psychoanalysis, based on the analyst's infallibility.

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