The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From ghost to ancestor (Relational Perspectives Book Series) by Adrienne Harris & Steven Kuchuck

Author:Adrienne Harris & Steven Kuchuck
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

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FREUD AND FERENCZI

Wandering Jews in Palermo1

Lewis Aron and Karen Starr

Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi were close friends and fellow travelers, wandering Jews who traveled and vacationed together regularly for many years. In our recent book (Aron and Starr, 2013), we examine the problematic place of binaries in the history of psychoanalysis, focusing in particular on Freud’s “optimally marginal” position at the crossroads of his Jewish racial and German cultural identities. Freud’s friend and colleague, Sándor Ferenczi, shared this divided Jewish Enlightenment identity. Freud and Ferenczi, like most of the early analysts, were part of a tradition of migration, acculturation, and assimilation (Erös, 2004). Both were from Jewish immigrant families who migrated from Eastern to Western Europe, from the shtetl to the large cosmopolitan city. Medicine, particularly private practice, was one of the free professions that allowed upward mobility independent from institutions that would not accept Jews.

Before and during World War I, the Jews of Austria-Hungary were intensely loyal to the state. In Austria, westernized Jews occupied multiple subject positions, thinking of themselves as German by language and culture or bildung, Austrian by political loyalty, and Jewish by race, ethnicity, or religion. In Hungary, Jews were more fully assimilated, or “Magyarized,” into the Magyar nation. Identifying as Hungarian, they spoke Hungarian and German along with Yiddish (Rozenblit, 2001). The Freud–Ferenczi correspondence is filled with Yiddish idioms, such as Ferenczi’s (1915) describing his own theory that “all libido is based on ‘nachas’” (pleasure) (p. 80). We will explore the personal and professional relationship between Freud and Ferenczi, two Jewish Enlightenment men—friends, colleagues, and analytic couple—who enacted between them dynamics shaped to a great extent by their characteristic reactions to their anti-Semitic and homophobic cultural surround.

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