Anonymity: blank screen or black hole

The power of exclusion (an ode to Sheldon Bach and Sandor Ferenczi).

“…I will get to more of his contributions later, but for the Freudians long before 1988, we already had Stone’s (1961) book The Psychoanalytic Situation , which had an enormous impact on my thinking. It is noteworthy that I read that book several times because of my interest in the classical Freudian view of the blank screen, which led to my article on anonymity (Ellman, 2011). I never noticed until I read Ferenczi that Stone was fascinated with all the techniques that Ferenczi had used and spent a great deal of that book in dialogue with some of Ferenczi’s ideas.…”