Oregon Psychoanalytic Center

This event addresses: Ferenczi’s Secret Life

Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. Routinely attacked by conservative commentators as a boundarv vio ation and an exploitation of the patient, Rudnytsky defends Ferenczi’s experiment on both counts and argues that mutual analysis serves as a paradigm for the two-person model of relational analysis, as Freud’s self-analysis is a paradigm for the one-person model of classical analysis. Ferenczi’s return to Freud’s pre-1897 (misnamed) “seduction theory,” and his concomitant modifications of therapeutic technique, caused him to go underground and develop a secret life trom Freud in a way that has until recently been necessary for trauma theorists.

Peter L. Rudnytsky, Ph.D., L.C.S. W., is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs as well as Chair of theCommittee on Confidentiality of APsaA. He is Editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge and Coeditor of the Psychoanalysis series for Bloomsbury. He received the Gradiva Award for Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (Cornell, 2002), and his most recent book is Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (Routledge, 2022).

Clinical material will be presented by a local analyst Jeanne Johnson, MD.