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A “Work in Progress” Between Past,

Present and Future: The Dream in/of
Sándor Ferenczi
Franco Borgogno Ph.D.
Published online: 18 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Franco Borgogno Ph.D. (2014) A “Work in Progress” Between Past, Present and
Future: The Dream in/of Sándor Ferenczi, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health
Professionals, 34:2, 80-97, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.850275

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 Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34:80–97, 2014
Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver
ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.850275

A “Work in Progress” Between Past, Present and Future:

The Dream in/of Sándor Ferenczi

Franco Borgogno, Ph.D.

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Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave

A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not
Trac’d upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. (Keats 1817, The Fall of Hyperion, Canto I, lines 1-15)

WHY THIS TITLE?

As the title of this article suggests, Ferenczi’s thinking about dreams—not differently from
his whole psychoanalytic reflection—is a work in progress. Suspended, as it is, somewhere
between the pioneering times of psychoanalysis and an absolute modernity (rarely to be found
either among his contemporaries or the immediately following generations of analysts), Ferenczi

Prof. Franco Borgogno is Full Professor of Clinical Psychology, Turin University, Italy; Training and Supervising
Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalyitcal Society (IPA); Founder of the S. Ferenczi International Foundation; Recipient of
the 2010 M. Sigourney Award; author of the recent The Girl Who Committed Hara-Kiri and Other Historico-Clinical
Essay.
This article is a reworking of chapter 11 of my book Psychoanalysis as a Journey (Open Gate Press, London 2007).
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 81

oscillates in his conception of dreams between a thought that has already been metabolized but
is in part still visual-visionary and metaphorical, and a finely-elaborated discourse. For such
a characteristic of his, he combines, in approaching them, the old emphasis on catharsis and an
anticipatory perspective which sees dreams as a ‘mise en scène’, ‘renewed-presentation’ and ‘rep-
resentation’ (a space, that is, of potential transformation) not only of past history of the patient,
but also of his analytic history, the most recent included.
Right from his very early works, Ferenczi considered. in fact, what is staged and represented
“iconically” and “dramatically” as a proto-thought which comes out of the ongoing experience,
“attracts to itself“(1909b, p. 39) past affective vicissitudes, and also “promotes” them by making
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them relevant to the present and by potentially giving them a new organization. In his perspective
the analyst is not only “a catalytic ferment”- (Ferenczi 1909b, p. 39) but “the evoking cause”
(Ferenczi 1909b, p. 85) for the dream and, with regard to the future, a facilitating element on
the level of working-through, if we take into account that the prime element repressed in dream
presentation is the interactive context in which it has come about and is brought up. Moreover,
the iconic and dramatic level of the dream is important for Ferenczi not because of the content
of thought and unconscious phantasy that it expresses but because of the mood and atmospheric
quality it describes. This is what primarily needs to be investigated because dreams (here Ferenczi
picks up Silberer) manifest “self-perceptions that are symbolically represented” (Ferenczi 1913b,
p. 217) that illuminate “the way of functioning of the mind [of the subject] (e.g. its ease, difficulty,
inhibition, etc.)” (1912a, p. 261) inside the relational situation that has stimulated them.
For Ferenczi, then, dreams are at the same time buried memory and memory in formation.
They offer, perhaps, a cryptic but nonetheless precise image of relational events that can be either
old and obsolete or new (or at any rate ongoing). They are, above all, communication. In his view,
what is inscribed and reflected in dreams is not the general intersubjective world that characterizes
the individual but the ‘psychic reality’ of the patient as it is being constructed event after event,
session after session, through significant ties such as that with the analyst and analysis.
I make here a short digression on the concept of psychic reality in Ferenczi because it was in
his understanding of this idea that originated his particular technical sensibility and his unmis-
takable style as an analyst. Psychic reality is for him subjective and in progress: subjective in the
sense that it is the reality of the individual as subject and not as object or other people’s prop-
erty; ‘in progress because no reality is given once and for all and, far from being static, each
reality implies a movement and a becoming that intertwine continually and deeply with the vari-
ous levels of the context in question and, of course, with the mental functioning of one’s chosen
interlocutors.
By consequence, the present is central to the point of view Ferenczi adopts. Indeed it is in
the here and now that the past emerges for the analyst who has prepared the theoretical and
technical instruments suitable to receive it. Also the future of the relationship and of the subject
takes shape, provided the analyst includes this direction of values among his cognitive means,
which will enable him to identify the seeds and outlines of identifications to come on the basis
of the slightest and most imperceptible signs and gestures (as today authors, see: Fédida 1992;
Perelberg 2000).
I have been talking about theoretical, technical and value-based instruments and means. From
Ferenczi’s perspective—it should be recalled—these are, above all, psychic qualities, in other
words, a human endowment based on imaginative and affective identification that is equipped to
be insightful about the patient’s feelings. It is, definitively, the patient’s “dissociated sensibility”
 82 FRANCO BORGOGNO

that must be called upon in the sessions to be transformed into “industrious co-operation,”
because—as Ferenczi argues (1909c, p. 124)—a dream without a “laborious analysis” and the
lively associations of the dreamer, as well as his alert presence, would lose its value as a specific
message and would not be really available for genuine work by the psychoanalytic dyad (Ferenczi
1919).
In Ferenczi’s view, dreams are poised between the fulfillment of a childhood oedipal wish
and the more economical attempt to solve problems and conflicts that, for him, are frequently
generated by traumas, as his last works criticizing Freud illustrate (traumas that are not single
events but inappropriate conditions for growth that are not even recognized as being lacking or
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defective, with the result that the denial aggravates the traumatic effect; see The Clinical Diary,
Ferenczi 1932a).1 They can thus be a valuable psychic opportunity for the narration and inte-
gration of the person and his multiple encounters. For such an opportunity to occur and become
conscious, nevertheless, there needs to be a mind that receives the dreams and a language that this
mind expresses as it seeks to “awaken them” and “loosen their tongue” (Ferenczi, 1932b p. 166).
This is no less than what both Keats, quoted in exergo, says: everybody “hath visions, and would
speak, if he had loved and been well nurtured in his mother tongue,” and Coleridge had well
conveyed in these words: “The first lesson, that innocent Childhood affords me, is—that it is an
instinct of my Nature to pass out to Myself, and to exist in the form of others. . . . The second
is—not to suffer any one form to pass into me and to become a usurping Self in the disguise of
what the German pathologists call a fixed Idea” (Coleridge 1830, p. 68).
So, in Ferenczi, past and future are what are at stake in the speech that, in various ways,
psychoanalytic treatment in the present triggers, starts off and mobilizes as a further opportunity
for education and (emotional and existential) language learning. For this to happen and to set
in motion a new beginning and development, the analyst—as Ferenczi indicated throughout his
clinical journey—must, in any case, save dreams from the incantation of phantasy, freeing the
patient—if necessary—from the suggestive and mute ‘sable charm and dumb enchantment’ of
the key “persons of his life’s history” (Ferenczi 1926b, p. 20), including the analyst. As a matter
of fact, he reckons that their influence, whether for good and ill, should be teased out and attested
step by step, only then to be profitably forgotten after it has been chosen or rejected as a part
of self that can be useful (or not) or appropriate (or not) to the present circumstances and thus
can leave room for the life and the individual voice of the subject, rooted with dignity in shared
human society.
To put it briefly, in Ferenczi’s theoretical framework the richly symbolic potential of the dream
refers to events that belong to the register of the species whilst they also belong to life past and
present and have become, for the subject, content and mental modes that perform an essential
instrumental function in “reckoning” (Ferenczi 1926c, pp. 376–377) with the external world.

1 Evidently, Ferenczi saw Freuds Traum-Deutung as a Trauma-Deutung, where what is traumatic is the quantity of
pain present in a psychic experience, which the patient may have registered but which he does not have the appropriate
tools to metabolize. The traumatolytic function of dreams is to reproduce an excessively painful experience in the attempt
to creatively give it a better solution. The repetition is for him, therefore, not purely instinctual, but comes from the ego
in its effort to modify suffering in the most economical and advantageous way (see Garma 1940; Marucco 1998; Jiménez
Avello 2012). This point of view became dominant in his last works, where Ferenczi points out that censure, when it
imposes a distortion, “estimates both the extent of the damage and that part of it which the ego can bear, and admits to
perception only as much of the form and content of the trauma as is bearable, and if necessary, even palliates it by a
wish-fulfillment” (Ferenczi 1920–1932, p. 241).
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 83

This potential is, however, only rich and fertile to the extent to which their special interpreter—
the analyst—is able to activate it in his affective and emotional exchange with the patient. His
equanimous patience, his dedicated and humble commitment, his courage and openness towards
the other, his willingness to risk himself as a person in the interaction—for example, entering
into the roles and characters that the analytic experience requires him to embody (Ferenczi and
Rank 1924)—are consequently elements that are called up to the front line by the analytic attitude
proposed by Ferenczi.
Ferenczi’s basic point is that dreams are visual and auditory phenomena: They occur before
one’s eyes and are narrated to one’s ears. Still, one’s eyes and ears must know how to see the
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vision and understand the language of the person narrating them. Once this vision and this lan-
guage have been taken in they must be connected to the near and distant contexts that fuel and
animate them. Only then can they promote that remembering and reproducing that unfreezes and
gives birth to psychic life (emotions and thought), always bearing in mind that it is not only
Freudian wishes that are an insistent presence in dreams, but also the reality and the ego of
the subject as he searches for a future path that is livable, emotionally richer and socially more
involved. Incidentally, it must be mentioned that Ferenczi’s focus on subjectivity is also different
from Jung’s archetypal themes on dreams.
For the knowledge that dreams contain to achieve this result, something more than art and
science is required; the indispensable circumstances of experience conducive to transformation
also need to be created. These are made possible by the generous analyst, who agrees to dream
(Bion 1992; Ogden 2001, 2005; Ferro 2009) and personify (Bion 1975/1977/1979; Grotstein
2007; Borgogno 2011; Borgogno and Vigna-Taglianti 2012) the dreams together with the patient
so that the lived, reproduced, and dreamt unconscious acquires a face and a form suitable to
the genuine understanding of that specific patient. For everybody—Ferenczi declares—feeling is
believing (Ferenczi 1913a), but this is even more true for those patients (numerous in his clinical
experience and in ours) who have lost all contact and link with words, sensations and affects (and
all sense of connection between them), and who are, often without even realizing it, unable to
communicate with themselves and with others and are thus also victims of a global relational and
existential impoverishment.

THE DIASPORA OF A RADICAL INNOVATION

Ferenczi, as it is well known, introduced the importance of the mother into psychoanalysis and,
in particular, brought the maternal side (the side that Freud fled from, admitting that he could
not explore and, above all, personify it in his analyses) into play on a more conscious level. Also
because of this, he was the initiator of a therapeutic vision that focused on intersubjectivity and
that, in the terminology of his pupil Rickman (1951), can be called “bi-multi-personal.”
This peculiar slant is clearly evident in his reading of dreams in terms of relationship and
communication as a form of thought in images that depicts psychoanalytic interaction in its
progressive becoming and functions as an important indicator of the qualities of the analysts
listening.
Ferenczi seems to have realized that the patient is in relationship even when he cannot be
completely aware of it, and that he talks and thinks about this relationship, saying for example
how it is developing, from his perspective, at a given moment of the analysis in connection with
 84 FRANCO BORGOGNO

the analyst’s interpretive words and silence, as well as catching, prereflexively, the unconscious
messages that the analyst’s words and silence have conveyed independently of their conscious
and deliberate intention.
Looked at in this light, the dream comes to signal the current state of the relationship and is, in
some ways, always a perceptually healthy response, as long as the analyst is able to recognize the
peculiar point of view that the patient adopts and does not hastily label his subjective reality as
distorted and pathological. So it is a clue and a reaction that the analyst has to assess carefully if
he is to understand, calibrate and attune his own psychoanalytic position in the best way possible.
Let me draw especial attention to this last point: It is one of Ferenczi’s hobby horses and goes
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under the name of tact. By using this term, the main dimension Ferenczi is trying to emphasize
(also in relation to dreams) is that, if the analyst is to engage in a profitable encounter with
the patient and if he is to re-awaken/enliven the patient’s potential for emotional involvement,
he must take into account the patient’s idiosyncrasies when evaluating his own words to him
(Ferenczi 1928; Borgogno 2012).
For these words to have the effect of remobilizing the patient’s withdrawn, frozen, mortified
and offended libido, they must be adapted to the mental states, to the phase of development the
patient is going through, and to the vulnerability, rhythm, span and extent of his capacity for
attention. We cannot take it for granted that the patient will understand what we put to him,
because he may not so promptly comprehend the formulations that we use and that appear simple
and clear to us, as they are predicated upon a sophisticated process of understanding (on the
language and the emotional style of the interpretation see, besides Ferenczi, also Balint 1952,
1959, 1968; Winnicott 1968; Giannakoulas 1993; Wright 2008;, and in general D. Quinodoz
2003).
One should also bear in mind that in analysis, according to Ferenczi, the child and the baby
in the patient are the main interlocutor, so one needs to look not only at the child ‘that sleeps
in the unconscious’ but also to his parents, and one should ask oneself questions about one’s
psychic life (Ferenczi, 1923) and about the commands and directives one has imposed on the
child through hypnotism and suggestion (Ferenczi, 1908, 1909a, 1909b).
The analyst who is able to understand the patient’s need and longing for objects and affects,
his dependency and suggestibility, even when these have disappeared from the scene and are
no longer consciously represented, who can see in his own intervention and behavior the sur-
reptitious unconscious transmission of meta-communications (impossible not to be sent) dense
with value that prescribe intentions, thoughts, feelings (whether desirable or not) and how to face
and put them into practice, is—Ferenczi seems to conclude—in the most suitable disposition to
appreciate and grasp the intelligent utterance that dreams make about the present.
From this vantage point, where dreams have become alive word in the present experience,
it will be possible for the analyst to trace back to the remote past the reasons that may have
elicited them, and slowly to give back to the patient a substantial and bodily image of himself
that, triggered by the present interaction, opens a window on his internal world, which the dream
reflects, as well as on the history which has gradually constituted and shaped it in its particular
way (as today authors, see Jacobs 2001; J.-M. Quinodoz 2001).
These ideas of Ferenczi’s, which I have tried here to condense as far as possible to render
explicit the theoretical framework underlying his approach to dreams, were spread and dissem-
inated namelessly in the community of analysts, carried forward as they were over the years,
mostly without being appropriately quoted or adequately acknowledged.
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 85

The first to embrace them were the British Independents, of which Ferenczi was, in fact, the
progenitor (Rayner 1990); amongst these must be remembered Suttie (1935) and Ferenczi’s direct
pupils, the Balints and Rickman, who kept up his name (the Balints by commenting in detail on
his thought and Rickman by fighting for his work to be speedily and correctly translated). We also
need to add Winnicott, who continued his direction and stole the substance of his ideas in many
passages in his writings (Borgogno 2007), candidly confessing his theft (“It’s quite possible for
me to have got this original idea of mine about the antisocial tendency and hope, which has
been extremely important to me in my clinical practice, from somewhere. I never know what
I’ve got out of glancing at Ferenczi, for instance, or glancing at a footnote to Freud;” Winnicott
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1967, p. 579); Paula Heimann, who wrote on countertransference after the International Journal
in 1949 (twenty years later) had eventually given the go-ahead to the publication of some of his
fundamental works, previously kept out of circulation by the notorious seizure ordered repeatedly
by Jones (later she even went so far as to re-appraise his thinking further when she reflected on
the meta-communicative and multiple functions of interpretation; Heimann 1949, 1970, 1975;
Borgogno 1999); and courageous Margaret Little (1957, 1980), who was personally responsible
for helping to translate Ferenczi’s works and was indelibly influenced by them in her daring and
important theses about the subjective response of the analyst in the understanding of the patient;
all these ideas—Little’s, but also Heimann’s, Winnicott’s and Balint’s—have been more recently
taken up by Bollas (1987, 1989) in his free, lively and unconventional style of writing.
In the 1950s the spirit of Ferenczi’s legacy crossed the Atlantic and re-emerged in Racker,
a sensitive and acute analyst who trained with Helene Deutsch and was deeply appreciative of
this spirit, which he developed further in Argentina in his study of countertransference. It was
also kept alive by Garma, the Barangers, Rodrigué and García Badaracco in Buenos Aires: in
their exploration of the psychoanalytic situation, they retained the fundamental vertices suggested
by Ferenczi, after having suffused them—as Racker himself had done—with a less rigid and
assertive version of Melanie Klein, already very much filtered by the metabolization initiated by
Heimann with her painful and important vicissitudes (see Borgogno 1999; Berman 2004a; and,
regarding the influence of Ferenczi on Melanie Klein’s thinking, Likierman 2001).
This softening of Klein’s theses, ‘rinsed’ in Ferenczi’s theories, which, to a large extent, pro-
vided their original matrix, can be found in Bion too, who—as I have stressed, among others
(Borgogno 1993; Borgogno and Merciai 1997; Sosnik 1997; Chasseguet-Smirgel 1987; Eekhoff
2011)—was very close to him in his thinking after the ‘turning-point’ of 1967, when, not unlike
Ferenczi himself (1932a, pp. 37–38), he too maintained (to mention but one point) that what
patients want and what some of them literally need is not an interpretation but to experience
“live” during the treatment how the analyst feels, manages, and works-through the interpsychic
events at the root of their affective and mental suffering (Bion 1992, p. 291). Rosenfeld himself
became Ferenczian when, towards the end of his life, he ‘struck a blow’ for the co-operative
relationality of the patient, who tries at all events to convey to the analyst information about his
illness and his suffering, and who also, through his response, monitors his interventions and his
silences, albeit in a cryptic and hidden way (Rosenfeld 1987; Nissim Momigliano 1989–1990).
It was, however, in Faimberg’s theory of listening to listening, put forward in 1981 (Faimberg
1981), that Ferenczi, in many respects, made a full return and re-presented himself, at his best,
in the figure of the emotionally and mentally refined analyst, whom she put to work combin-
ing the authors cited with a smattering of Lacan (Lacan was a great admirer of Ferenczi, and
spoke of him as the supreme investigator of what is required of the person of the analyst to
 86 FRANCO BORGOGNO

responsibly achieve the aim of the treatment).2 Faimberg follows in the footsteps of Ferenczi
when she describes the patient articulating a narrative of how the analyst listened to him, and
maintains that this is the route to individuate, in the interplay of unconscious identifications
worked-through in analysis, the imaginary receiver he is addressing, who is now momentarily
embodied in the analyst who constitutes his personification by virtue of his capacity to contain
without hesitation or reservation.
As far back as the 1920s, Ferenczi, anticipating Faimberg’s contemporary perspective
(Faimberg 1996), argued that the future more robust integration and identity of the subject
hinged on his being assisted to recognize—in his own “words,” “disconnected words,” “bodily
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symptoms,” “shapes of his visions,” in the “voices of his auditory hallucinations”—the princi-
pal “pathogenetic” characters of his life history, and their unconscious messages and relational
modalities that come back to life in the here and now (Ferenczi 1926b, p. 20).
Having reminded the reader of the diaspora to which his intuitions were condemned and also
having rendered tribute to the author who suffered that diaspora, I now intend to hand over to
Ferenczi himself, recalling, once more, how his ideas emigrated and gained much following in the
United States, where they formed the basis for the interpersonalism of Clara Thompson and Harry
Stack Sullivan and part of culturalism à la Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (for a
long time these writers were snubbed by supercilious deep-thinking Europeans, who very often
did not even read them, on account of what they saw as American superficiality in material and
clinical cases). Moreover, Ferenczi’s ideas clearly inspired Searles (an author whose theories we
cannot go into in any depth here but who was the star pupil of Ferenczi in America) and the most
recent theories of the Self (Kohut, for example) and contemporary psychoanalysis, which only
now has rediscovered Ferenczi as its authentic progenitor, making amends for its unforgivable
past silence (Shapiro 1993; Lichtenberg 1997; Gedo 1986; Rachman 1989, 2010; Wolstein 1993;
Aron and Harris 1993; Aron 1996; Berman 1997; Rudnytsky 2002).

THE DREAM AS A POINT OF INTERSECTION BETWEEN TWO UNCONSCIOUSES

IN DIALOGUE

In the two dreams I describe here, the first accompanied by an exchange of words between
Ferenczi and one of his colleagues, the basic point I stress is the specific nature of his clini-
cal work, which focuses on the dialogue of unconsciouses and approaches dreams not only as
symbolic expression of unconscious tendencies but also as the attempt to transcribe and work-
through current events in which the day’s residues, which he felicitously calls life’s residues
(Ferenczi 1934), directly involve the analyst and his individual technique, so that the present
and the past can once again be made accessible and re-animated in their traumatic, anxious and
painful remnants.
Studying the variety of dreams starting from the moment and the context in which they are
communicated (according to Ferenczi 1913c, p. 349, dreams are told “to the very person to whom

2 FromGranoff on (Granoff 1958, 1975), France has decidedly loved Ferenczi and, considerating him one of the
most central figures—if not the most central figure—in the development of psychoanalysis, has dedicated many books
and collections of essays to him. In France, moreover, Judit Dupont (Michael Balint’s nephew), as literary executor of
Ferenczi’s works, has dedicated her life to care for his oeuvre.
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 87

the latent content relates”), he explores in a radically innovative way the changes in the Freudian
drive-defense dynamic by means of the interplay of transference and countertransference, open-
ing in this way a new chapter in their interpretation centered on the transformations brought about
by the relationship.
The pilot text on this regard is On Transitory Symptom Constructions During the Analysis
(Ferenczi 1912b), which I see as a gem of procedure for the psychoanalytic spirit that informs
it and that encompasses the Freud of ‘Little Hans’ and much of the future developments of
psychoanalytic thought (Borgogno 1998). Here Ferenczi—let me repeat once again—traces
back the symptomatic actions of his patients, dreams included, not only to the endopsychic
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vicissitudes illustrated by Freud, but also to intersubjective events elicited by unconscious

elements in the analyst that act as the exogenous trigger in connection with their individual
histories.
The first example, taken from Dreams of the Unsuspecting (Ferenczi 1917), vividly reflects
Ferenczi’s style, even with its partly rudimentary and perhaps somewhat rough and ready nature.
I have chosen it deliberately as I cannot comment in detail on The Dream of the Occlusive Pessary
(Ferenczi 1915; see Falzeder 1997), which would, of course, give a fuller and more substantial
picture of his psychoanalytic creativity because Ferenczi describes at great length and with a
didactic approach, in the interpretative work he shows in it, the complete self-analysis of a dream.
This is the passage from Dreams of the Unsuspecting I am referring to:

A colleague staying there said to me one morning: “I dreamt about you last night. You were struggling
in a canal with an apache who wanted to force you under the water. I ran for the police to fetch you
help.” “What have I done to you that you should be so angry with me?” I could not keep from asking.
“Why, nothing at all; I dreamt so vividly because I had severe colic all night.” “That may have its
share in the formation of the dream,” I replied; “the canal in which I was to have been drowned may
be an allusion to the alimentary canal, which, therefore, in the dream was to do me, not you, harm.
I repeat, you must be annoyed with me about something!” “You dont mean that I wanted to drown
you because you had to refuse me that little favour yesterday? You will never make me believe that!”
This, however, interpreted the dream for me as a revenge phantasy. [Ferenczi 1917, pp. 346–347]

The second example comes from the year 1926 (Ferenczi 1926d). It offers a more mature
and refined, and also clearly elegant and modern version (one almost feels one is listening in on
a supervision taking place in the present) of the psychoanalytic interpretation already implicit
in the comment on the previous dream. Here Ferenczi displays the emotional and ideational
response of the patient to the assuming peremptoriness of the analyst (in this case the ana-
lyst is Rank, but we could all find ourselves in his position) and vigorously underlines that
the analyst should listen first to the patient’s associations and affects (“One must patiently fol-
low the path prescribed [both for him and for us] by his individual fortunes,” Ferenczi 1926d,
p. 97) before listening to his own theories and ideological preferences, if he wants to reach
him, in his individual history, and to give him the appropriate tools to work-through his uncon-
scious phantasy. These theories and preferences in themselves are, at any rate, certainly less
important than the manner in which they are used emotionally in helping another mind, so
much so that he goes so far as to say: “After all it is possible to ‘cure’ people by every kind
of technique: by father interpretations, by mother interpretations, by historical explanations,
by emphasizing the analytical situation, and even by our old friends suggestion and hypnosis”
(Ferenczi 1926d, p. 97).
 88 FRANCO BORGOGNO

To make things easier for the reader, let me quote Rank’s patient’s dream in full:
I was being analysed, and was lying on the sofa. The analyst was very familiar to me, but I cannot
say who he was. I had to tell him a dream of a journey that I was to undertake, to visit some common
friends. When I had begun, I was interrupted by an old woman who was sitting on a stool and wanted
to interpret the dream in a popular manner (in an old wives’ way). I told the analyst that I could tell
the dream better if she did not interrupt me. Then he told her to be silent, got up, took hold of the
hammock in which I now seemed to be lying with both his hands, and shook me hard. Then he said:
‘When you were born, you were quite red (in the face). Then you were laid on a sofa, and your father
sat down beside you.’ I was surprised in the dream at his explanation, and thought: “This is very
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far-fetched,: . . . etc. [Ferenczi 1926d, pp. 95–96]

Here are Ferencz’s thoughts:

Rank interprets this as a comparison of the analytical experience with the patient’s own birth; the
task of the analyst is that of the obstetrician: he shakes the patient till she comes into the world red
in the face. Is it not much likelier that this dream fragment is to be interpreted in connection with
the analytical situation, as meaning that “the meager interpretations of the mother-situation in the
analysis,” which had already been given to the patient, had been enough to arouse all her ridicule
and scorn against those interpretations? She calls the analyst an old woman, who interprets in an old
wives way, will not allow the patient to have her say, keeps on interrupting her and shakes her till
she admits the mother-interpretation (of having been born from the analyst). If so, it would seem that
Rank was fooled by his patient into taking her ironically exaggerated agreement seriously, and into
actually using it as a support for his birth-theory. [ Ferenczi 1926d, p. 95]

With this comment, Ferenczi is clearly referring to the self-critical vigilance and the
countertransference working-through of the analyst, who must watch over any possible narcis-
sistic attitudes of which the dream is an accurate photographic shot.3 Ferenczi also denounces
the quite common idea, not exclusive to Rank, that deep interpretation—which frequently corre-
sponds to a selected theory—is what makes the patient quickly open up, neglecting to investigate
“with evenly-suspended attention . . . why and how something came about in that way” (Ferenczi
1926d p. 95) from several angles of vision and on several levels of interpretation.
Unlike Rank, who asserts—with a certain roguish lightness and superficiality, in Ferenczi’s
view—that the analysis is not interested in the patient’s cold or where he “caught the infec-
tion,” Ferenczi would have taken this as his starting point and explored its origin in the present
psychoanalytic situation, because it is through the elucidation of the symptom and the reasons for
its appearance in the present relationship that one can genuinely understand the primitive trans-
ference, and not by cancelling it out with intellectual interpretations given too soon, before it has
been “established” and also “consciously realized” (Ferenczi 1926d, p. 97).
As Ferenczi concludes in this second example, it is not sufficient therefore for the analyst
to have in mind the birth of the patient. This occurs only after a prolonged and fertile men-
tal coupling and results from a considerable psychic gestation, which—as also The Dream of
the Occlusive Pessary (Ferenczi 1915) clearly shows—requires the analyst to take responsibility

3 In his conception of the dream as a place made up of the “constitutive parts of the personality,” not all of which

definitely come from the subject because some might be of primitive introjective and projective origin (by suggestion,
contagion, mimetism), Ferenczi is particularly close to Fairbairns 1944 idea of dreams as “snapshots or rather shorts (in
the cinematographic sense) of situations existing in inner reality” (p. 77).
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 89

for the accompanying generative or occlusive, containing or abortive movements implicit in his
interventions and in the emotional actions, which always go hand in hand with them and which
generate certain ways of being and learning contexts and exclude others.
In short—Ferenczi contends—analysts need more than interpretations that talk about the
mother if they want to analyze the maternal transference. It is decidedly necessary, instead, for
the analyst to see which kind of psychic function is really at work in himself in the matter at
hand, to look courageously at the pragmatics of his own communications, and to be ready to
recognize any possible failings on his part with regard to the primary needs and desires of the
patient at that moment. In such circumstances, Ferenczi was particularly acute at appreciating
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role-reversals produced by laxity and psychoanalytic inconsistency (Borgogno 2010, 2011). He

was also very good at tuning in to the unconscious protests and complaints secretly manifested
in the material, as is evident in his observations on Rank’s dream. He knew, for example, that
the child’s cold was by no means a mild symptom for the ‘child’ within the patient and saw how
it pointed to abandonment, sense of rejection, despair and loss of hope at infantile levels of the
mind (Ferenczi 1929b).

THE SIGNS AND SYMBOLS OF TRAUMAS: A REVISION OF THE

PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I should at this point—to do no wrong to his many works about it—linger on the Ferenczi who
interprets dreams in a classical way, but for reasons of space I will not do it and directly go
forward to the thought of Ferenczi’s last period and to his revision of the Freudian interpretation
of dreams he accomplishes shortly before his death. Of this Ferenczi, who interprets dreams
using the classical approach (and who, as I said, I will not consider here), I would however like
to highlight the fervid imagination, deeply careful in not attributing to the dreamer words and
affects not belonging to him and in building a bridge between himself and his interlocutor and
the various interlocutors present in the latter’s dreams. It is in this connection, in fact, that Freud
(1933, p. 228) and Melanie Klein have come to say, the one, that Ferenczi “has made (himself
included) all analysts into his pupils,” the other that he was a man with an unusual gift for the
understanding of the unconscious, the symbolism and the psychology of the young child. “The
bridge,” by the way, was one of his favorite symbols as a metaphor of the idea of “uniting” and
“separating” (making the journey viable) and expediting “the unborn (the not yet born) into life”
(Ferenczi 1921, p. 354).
Children, multiple and primitive identifications, legitimate needs not to be ignored, vulnera-
bility and dependance of children, respect of the infantile soul, recognizing some kind of equality
and symmetry between the patient and the analyst, notwithstanding their different analytic role—
these will be exactly the most important elements of his new therapeutic background, which
will also come to involve his new reading of dreams according to a revised theory and tech-
nique. He no longer explains these, as I mentioned at the beginning of my article, mainly in
terms of fulfilling instinctual wishes (in his view, a perspective that only applies to the most
highly developed and differentiated mental levels) but as a constant search for recognition and
the attempt to resolve undigested and traumatic life experiences that lack the vocabulary to be
expressed affectively and consciously and a suitable internal space where they can be shared.
These experiences—I emphasize—may not initially concern the subject who goes through them
 90 FRANCO BORGOGNO

but the parents and also the previous generations who “displace upon posterity the bulk” of the
traumatically unresolved and unmastered experiences, especially the catastrophic ones (Ferenczi
1924, p. 23), and appear in dreams as “historical monuments,” “revenants,” and “buried memo-
ries” (the “commemorative monument,” “phantasms,” and “crypt” of Abraham and Torok 1976,
1987, which contain the unelaborated unconscious of the parents, experienced by the subject as
“extraneous and not belonging to his own self”).
That is why for Ferenczi, the dreamer, to survive the experience of such great pain, may even
have gone so far as to cut off the head from the body as an ultimate defense, because dreams
manifest unconscious feeling and unfelt knowing that are totally detached from each other. For
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him, however, the split (and the correlative frequent fragmentation or atomization that it leads to
and from which it follows) is not the exclusive and peculiar prerogative of the dreamer, because
in many cases it may have been the environment that fostered and continued to foster the split
both by not bearing out and denying the traumatic events and by warning the subject not to speak
of them and not to let them live on in the mind and in the emotions (in this regard, see also Fonagy
and Target 2000; Canestri 2008).
In such circumstances, then—Ferenczi seems to be saying—it is not only a question of
facing up to a partial dissociation of sight and hearing but bringing back to life a state of
actual psychic and affective death that the dreams sharply portray and renewing human con-
tact with an experience that has been repudiated and, so to speak, made autistic by extreme
primitive autoplastic survival defenses.4 Above all, the analyst should offer a container, here
nonexistent, which enables the patient to look inside himself and feel capable of emotional rever-
beration and meaningful representation. He must find the best means to touch and unfreeze the
dreamers, helping them to re-enter their dreams and their skin, from their previous condition
of ‘being outside themselves’ and ‘outsiders’ of their own oneiric production (e.g., Bromberg
2006).
But—Ferenczi asks himself—how can this be achieved? What path must one take to over-
come this widespread state of anesthesiaand passivity? What can modify the “absolute paralysis
of motility,” which also includes “the inhibition of perception and (with it) of thinking,” leav-
ing ‘the complete defencelessness of the ego’? (Ferenczi 1920–1932, pp. 239–40). How can one
start a new impetus that allows patients to believe in what they have experienced and to reap-
propriate their own distant and forgotten memories, which perhaps they have never registered in

4 In a fragment dated 10/8/1930, Ferenczi points out that, in symptoms and in dreams, these traumatic conditions

can be represented in the following ways: the state of unconsciousness that follows the trauma as the “feeling of the
head being cut off or lost;” the confusion that accompanies it as “vertigo;” distressing surprise as “being caught in a
whirlwind;” the impotence of dying as “being projected into a lifeless thing or animal;” the splitting of personality as
“being torn to pieces;” fragmentation as “an explosion of the head” (Ferenczi 1920–1932, p. 221). In other passages, also
in Notes and Fragments, but in his last writings as well (especially Child Analysis in the Analysis of Adults, 1931, and
Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child, 1932b) and in The Clinical Diary (1932a), he described dreams
of his patients that talked about “heads detached from bodies walking on their own legs,” “heads connected to bodies
by a thin thread;” people “who levitate or observe from the ceiling” or “from a tree or a tower;” “burdens on backs,”
“hunchbacks,” “tumescences” which as “mortal embraces,” sometimes of people, torment children and adults dressed
up in maternal and paternal clothing; chases and attacks by ferocious beasts and bandits that one survives unshorn as
if nothing had happened, and so on; he also provided numerous examples of dreams that point to possible rape and
emotional abuse.
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 91

consciously experienced words? How can one help them escape the subjugation to and depen-
dence on inappropriate objects and restore them to a healthy self-appreciation (after this has been
mortified and sequestered) in an environment—I mean the psychoanalytic one—that must not be
‘additionally traumatic’?
Putting it as succinctly as possible, Ferenczi’s reply was that the analyst’s unremitting task is
to give credit to the patient’s perceptions and sensory impressions and to explore them, even those
which appear in dreams, using theory but, above all, with a profound spirit that takes into account
the possibility that in the large variety of ways of living there might be highly inappropriate
contexts for human upbringing and growth. These will be able to change, inside the patient and
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in his future relationships, only if the analyst does not deny their existence, also in himself, and
manages to ‘materialize’ (and give proof of) something different through the analysis (as to today
authors, see: Bleichmar 1997; Botella and Botella 2001).
Consequently, according to Ferenczi, the trauma—as the reader by now understands—must
be made present again in the session to bring it “for the first time to perception and to motor dis-
charge . . . under more favourable conditions” (Ferenczi 1920–1932, p. 240), where essentially
the attitude of the analyst will act as ‘a contrast’ to the parent from the past (Ferenczi 1929b).
For this purpose, the analyst will have to introduce into the psychoanalytic conversation different
visions, different values, different ways of meeting the patients’ needs and relieving their anxi-
eties, which pro tempore will substitute for a missing parental gaze and basic care, in the hope
that they will slowly replace the attractive power of the prosthetic and autarchic structures that
have taken their place.
In brief, more warmth and emotional involvement, more flexibility and responsiveness—
suggests Ferenczi—and more trust in the “reversibility of all psychic processes, that is, all not
purely hereditary” (1932a, p. 181), and especially an untiring effort to find split and dissoci-
ated memories in the traces left by the presence or absence of affects linked to that situation
(Ferenczi, 1932a) and in learning from the relationship “the exogenic causes of those traumas
and sensations, and the defences against them” (Ferenczi, 1920–1932, p. 234).
Summing up, Ferenczi’s practice of accepting and welcoming regression implies being able
to assume temporary responsibility for the psychic pain that the patient experiences (the analyst
is literally asked to ‘take it upon himself’),5 carrying out, for example, a systematic and thorough
exploration to determine whether among the murderers in the dreams, the indifferent, the mad
drivers, the unreachable, and the obtuse there might not be visualized aspects of discontinuity
and interruption of psychoanalytic commitment and attention; perhaps also some reservations in
assuming the persecution of the method; a certain antipathy towards weaknesses and abnormal-
ities of the patients that we might find annoying; some elements of revolt and repulsion in the
face of quotas of impotence, anger, despair, unease that he cannot experience at the moment.
Remaining in the difficult situation in which the patient finds himself at the same time as increas-
ing one’s listening and involvement becomes, therefore, indispensable, for Ferenczi, as essential

5 In his Clinical Diary (1932a, pp. 71–73), Ferenczi describes a patient who asks the analyst to show her that he

knows how to live with the catastrophic and agonic type of pain she has experienced. In the case he refers to, Ferenczi
intuits that his epileptic patient’s insistent requests that he would become Julius Caesar were, in fact, the implicit request
that he concretely “take within himself” his patient’s epileptic suffering to understand what she was experiencing. (The
pronunciation of Caesar in English, recalling the words “seize her = seizure” was interpreted by Ferenczi precisely in
this sense).
 92 FRANCO BORGOGNO

as putting on the patient’s clothes before giving them back, because the opposite approach of
pushing him too soon to collaborate in the common endeavor in a different way would only make
him once again the wise baby that he has probably already been under unmodifiable pressure from
his parents, reaching a form of complaisant and as if self-control that has not been effectively
developed and integrated.
It was this wave of insights that drove Ferenczi to criticize Freud’s theory of dreams as the
active fulfillment of a wish. Freud’s theory would inevitably attribute what is figured in the
dreams to the patient, ahead of time and moralistically, making him the responsible director
of his images and of our affective responses to the story they contain and in general to his behav-
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ior before, during and after the dream. Still, what would be useful from his point of view—all
the more so with this type of patient—is that the analyst should work-through the dream events
further, in the direction I have proposed, conceding and consenting the conditions of healing
and reconstruction that they need. This would also involve what Ferenczi calls “play-analysis”
(Ferenczi 1929a, 1931), which is basically an analysis where there is room for safety and for the
pleasure of discovery and re-finding, and not only for requests to be met and maturational tasks
to be completed on the basis of a rigid schedule (Ferenczi 1929a, 1931).
This disquieting and stimulating laboratory of ideas, which Ferenczi was unable to trans-
form into a truly satisfying new analytic “internal setting” on his own (without the support of
the community and colleagues), is the source of his appeal for “less suggestion of content”
and “more suggestion of courage” in feeling and thinking (Ferenczi 1931, p. 134), by which
he means the need for greater mental and emotional openness and a lessening of the ‘terrorism
of suffering’ that is implicit in the classic procedure. In other words, during these last years,
Ferenczi wondered whether our beloved theory, which proclaims with excessive certainty that
mental growth results from pain, frustration and absence, really has the capacity to restore and
acknowledge the patient who, humiliated and not validated in his value and autonomy, has with-
drawn from life and submitted to an emotional authority that was essential to his existence. He
also wondered whether pain, frustration and absence really help the mind whose growth (and,
in some cases, birth) one is trying to aid, or whether it might not rather be impellent upon
analysts to increase theirr emotional response and achieve a greater humility, availability and
dedication, thus questioning their narcissism and their comfort, which—as he aptly observes—
are so charming and advantageous for the. Likewise, they need to adopt a self-inquiring attitude
and to ask themselves whether they can—letting their gaze reach beyond his inevitably inade-
quate implementation of his noble and ideal aims—recognize the validity of Ferenczi’s critical
observations.
In concluding, I point out that his emotional dispute with Freud was of the same type. Freud
had often disregarded his requests for recognition and his needs for treatment, misunderstanding
their nature and hastily dismissing them as inopportune and childish. Ferenczi had repeatedly
made these requests and, in the face of Freud’s refusal to meet them, had apparently given up,
putting himself in the position of nourishing and treating the difficult psychic parturition of the
minds of others, even Freud’s one. In such a position, he also had often found himself having
to subordinate his own name and insights to the thought and the same faulty metabolization of
colleagues and patients.
But, to present-day readers of his work who can identify with him, it inescapably talks of
violated and impeded voices that analysis must redeem. This is the voice that gradually along its
journey began to have its own say, the voice that comes out clearly in all his later writings, which
 THE DREAM IN/OF SÁNDOR FERENCZI 93

move away from Freud to propose new vantage points of reflection that Freud had discarded and
to indicate an alternative mode of observation.
He could no longer, as he had done in the past, surrender his own children for the sake of
psychoanalysis. It thus became impossible for Ferenczi to give in to Freud’s renewed request
that he put aside something he perceived as his own to become President of the International
Psychoanalytic Association, and thus parent of all his colleagues. What for Freud were only
“fantasy-children” or children of his “island of dreams” (see the Freud-Ferenczi letter dated
5 May 1932; Freud and Ferenczi 1920–1933, p. 433) were now for him the fruit of his life as
an analyst and the offspring of his heart, belly and head encounter with his patients and with the
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psychoanalytic community, and it would have been true madness to accept to postpone and nullify
once more their birth. I am referring to the fact that, at the time of the Elma affair, Freud openly
urged Ferenczi to marry Gizella (who would not have been able to give him children), arguing
that, because she was older than him and more mature, she would be able to help Ferenczi work on
what Freud saw as his childish aspects and would ensure that Ferenczi did not waste his energy in
loving relationships (say, with Elma, Gizella’s daughter) other than in the cause of psychoanalysis
(Berman 2004b).
Had not Freud, himself, pointed out that understanding starts from making contact with
one’s own experience, whatever that may be? Had Freud not argued that profitable working-
through starts from taking into consideration the personal images inspired by the ongo-
ing relationship, even when they do not agree with how, and how much, one ought to
think?
It is this endeavor, one that demanded great ethical as well as professional commitment, that
Ferenczi embarked on with his Clinical Diary (Ferenczi 1932b), where he tried to work out con-
cretely the still theoretical, and therefore somewhat immature, technical assumption of 1926.
According to this principle, just to remind the reader, "every dream, every gesture, every para-
praxis, every aggravation or improvement in the condition of the patient” needs to be metabolized
in the present, through the analyst’s exploration of his “reciprocal” transference and resistance
(Ferenczi 1926a, p. 225), which demands his consistent involvement in the analysis, so as to gain
a lively knowledge of the dynamic process.
Certainly, he repeatedly got lost in his search for the vigilant consciousness necessary to
our role. But the psychoanalytic community, instead of welcoming the extraordinary value of
his masterly contribution, most of the times turned it into a fault and, following the classical
tradition analysts have learned from Greek dramas and myths (Haynal 1997), punished the auda-
cious heroic dreamer, branding him as psychotic and in this way discrediting every new intrepid
elevation of the mind that transcended the vanity of institutional thought and its underlying
pathology.
The life history of Ferenczi can perhaps equip one better and more solidly in one’s work on
dreams and invite one—this was his call—to render homage and justice to the gifts and skills
of those who are capable of dreaming (Ferenczi 1915, p. 311) and who, through dreams, create
avenues for the renewed-presentation and representation of the dissociated areas of the mind,
those areas that can be better understood through affect and emotional involvement than through
intellectual knowledge. But affect and emotional participation must sooner or later be expressed
in words and elaborated in narrative form if they are to effectively loosen the suggestive and
hypnotic bond and achieve those confidence and symbolization that promote useful separateness
in the indispensable mutuality of the encounter.
 94 FRANCO BORGOGNO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful to Arnold Wm. Rachman, Ph.D., for his careful review of this article.

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