“A Dress of Fire”: Reading Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary

Abstract

Ferenczi's Clinical Diary reveals an exceptional analyst who honestly and bravely documented radical clinical experiences and theoretical insights about the tragic impacts of trauma. The author follows Ferenczi's thinking from his falling out with Freud and his view of the classical psychoanalyst's objectivity and emotional detachment as triggers of the original trauma, through the use of the countertransference to lay bare trauma, eventually issuing in his radical experiment in mutual analysis. The Diary's fate in the history of psychoanalysis reflects that of its thinking on trauma: Beginning with Ferenczi's decades-long silencing and exclusion from the main psychoanalytic community, together with the silencing of actual trauma, this history evolved into the revival and dissemination of Ferenczi's thinking and the reappraisal of the role of actual trauma.