Threshold and impasse: excavating the maternal defense in Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary.

Abstract

Three dramatic conflicts emerge from Sandor Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary, when the Diary is analyzed as if it were a literary text. Using the interlocking symbols of the threshold and the impasse as an Ariadne’s thread to guide us through the Diary’s complexities, we can trace Ferenczi’s journey to intense self-awareness in the penultimate year of his life. These three conflicts are (1) the conflict between Freud and Ferenczi, (2) the conflicts experienced by Ferenczi and his patients in his work in mutual analysis, and (3) Ferenczi’s internal conflicts uncovered in the process of mutual analysis, resulting in his discovery of what I call “the maternal defense.” “The maternal defense” is an elaborate constellation, developed by Ferenczi over the course of his life to protect him from acknowledgment of his unconscious hatred and fear of women. Excavation of this defense created space ample enough to contain ambivalent feelings toward both women and Freud. Traditionally, the threshold is a “symbol of transition and transcendence . . . the function of the threshold is clearly to symbolize both the reconciliation and the separation of the two worlds of the profane and