In this paper, I am going to limit myself to tracing a map of the principal points in Ferenczi's thinking concerning trauma. Ferenczi's contribution to trauma theory is fundamental, even though up to today--in spite of the recent "Ferenczian Renaissance"--it still remains for many psychoanalysts simply not acknowledged and not considered and, when it is acknowledged and considered, it is frequently misunderstood or reported only in part. Perhaps this is because passages of his theory are extrapolated without knowing his entire clinical theoretical way or because he is quoted through others without the authors having personally read his work. These last ones are typical habits, as we know, to project one's own ideas, especially our prejudices.

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The aim of this paper is to present the close link between Ferenczi's and Winnicott's theoretical, clinical and therapeutic thought, indicating how this link has become something of a "missing link" in the history of psychoanalytic ideas, an implication which we retain, in part, to this day. In the first part entitled "Who's speaking to whom?", I aim to explore the contents of the most essential parts of their messages, stressing the similarities and differences between them, and citing the most important authors whom they address (Freud for Ferenczi, Klein for Winnicott). In the second part, I aim to tackle the general direction underlying both their work and their lives, concentrating specifically on "the maternal", and examining the repercussions of this aspect on psychoanalytic technique and practice. In the third part, as a kind of "Parting", I will present further brief conclusions on the relevance and significance of their thoughts in modern day psychoanalysis, defining Ferenczi and Winnicott as "founders of future discursiveness".

Within a clinical-theoretical framework focused on transference-countertransference dynamics, the authors reflect on role-reversal and on the reasons it has been neglected for a long time in literature. This primitive inter- and intra-psychic process, often at the forefront in our practice, will be discussed in its principal aspects (patient's unconscious identification with parents' psychic culture and concomitant dissociation of the infant part of the self), signaling how the enactment can be an inevitable element which, putting into play the past dissociated object relationships, becomes a source of mutative understanding.

In this paper the author discusses two points regarding Ferenczi's views of psychoanalysis. The first concerns the fact that analysts, like their patients, "come from afar" (a concept of Borgogno, 2011). The second, closely linked to the first, has to do with Ferenczi's belief that psychoanalytical knowledge is not intellectual but visceral, seeing that if analysts are to truly understand their patients they must first "take on" their suffering in such a way as to "become the patient." The author follows Ferenczi's progression along these two points through his whole oeuvre, from his first psychoanalytical writings to the Clinical Diary (1932a) of the last year of his life.