Loosening tongues : Sándor Ferenczi and the limits of subjectivity

Abstract

Trauma has been at the heart of psychoanalytic research since its establishment in the early twentieth century. Despite this, the psychoanalytic community has neglected the works of Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst and a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s, who dedicated most of his research to the analysis of the severely traumatised. While experimenting with different kinds of analytic techniques which disrupted the authority of the analyst, Ferenczi produced a number of key revisions to Freudian theory, particularly to the model of trauma common to psychoanalysis at the time. This is especially apparent in his most seminal paper, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child”, where he locates the traumatic kernel in the misunderstanding between two languages: the adult’s language of passion, and the child’s language of tenderness. In this dissertation, I analyse the ‘Confusion of Tongues’ and argue that not only is this a theory of trauma, but also a theory of subjectivity – one which describes a subject who would have preferred never to become a subject in the first place. Then, I examine whether it is possible for a subject’s own subjectivity to be undone. To do this, I first turn to Ferenczi’s biological speculations to claim that the subject’s striving to undo their subjectivity leads them to become further entrenched in the ‘Confusion of Tongues’. Second, I examine Ferenczi’s writings on death to argue that the only way a subject can undo their subjectivity is to perform a ‘two-children’ analysis. This is a kind of analysis where two subjects bring each other close enough to death that their subjectivity unravels. Consequently, they can finally speak to each other without the mediation of an adult and thus, with loose tongues.