Flight Into Sanity: Jones's Allegation of Ferenczi's Mental Deterioration Reconsidered

Abstract

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 The present study aims at reconsidering the question of Ferenczi's insanity on the basis of many unpublished documents.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.

Klein, Ferenczi and the Clinical Diary

“…The source of many of these rumors was Ernest Jones (1957), who seriously libeled Ferenczi in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Bonomi, 1999). Jones claimed, falsely, that Ferenczi lapsed into a severe psychosis during the last years of his life, and this discredited all Ferenczi's later work.…”

Book Review: Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement

“…(Curiously, Ferenczi’s “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” [1932] is not infrequently read in institutes as a paper crucial to understanding both the effects of real incest and the potential for their unnoticed and destructive repetition in the transference-countertransference; but it is often the sole work by Ferenczi in the curriculum.) The notion that Ferenczi was psychotic for decades has been extensively examined by Bonomi (1999) and thoroughly rebutted.…”

Franco Borgogno: The Girl Who Committed Hara-Kiri and Other Clinical and Historical Essays

“…It was in this historical context that, using a term which had a very negative connotation since it stemmed from the vocabulary of hypnotism, Ferenczi's method was rejected as a form of "rapport therapy" (Bonomi, 1999). Significantly, this term was used by Glover as an equivalent of "countertransference therapy" in his book review of the volume Dynamic Psychiatry edited by Alexander and Ross (1952).…”