Who is crazy, we or the patients? (the children or the adult?) Gaining access to the child in the adult: Reflections on child analysis in the analysis of adult from a ferenczian perspective
Abstract:
This paper is based on a clinical experience with adult analysands. I want to describe an experience of shock overwhelming the subject, where it is as if the individual is taken by surprise by an unfamiliar and overwhelming time. This experience can be described psychoanalytically as moments when the subject suddenly experiences contact with distinct psychic fragments that live within it in the form of an 'other time', otherwise available only in dreams or anxiety-ridden fantasies. What interests me is how clinical work can aim to allow the psychoanalytic situation to contain these psychic fragments through a certain form of regression. Such an approach seeks to connect to the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933). In particular the last contributions of Ferenczi, the essay Confusion of tongues as well as the long-hidden clinical diary he kept during the last year of his life, shows how the clinical work made Ferenczi aware of the child in fragments living within the adult and whom he saw as a possible guide for the analyst in his work. I will argue how Ferenczi's thinking about psychic fragments in his late texts outlines a reappraisal of the understanding of the death drive, where the repetition of trauma in the analytic situation has the potential to access meaning-bearing layers that intersect sensory and signifying levels of the psyche. The form of repetition the psychoanalytic situation invites has thus carries a promise of reaching the elements in the psychic life of fragments that served survival in the face of trauma. My aim is to explore the relevance of Ferenczi's work today, clinically and theoretically, in our time of crisis and catastrophes.