The Problem of Heredity: Ferenczi's Organology and the Politics of Bioanalysis

Abstract

At the beginning of the First World War, Sándor Ferenczi drafted a first version of his theory of genitality, which was to be published in 1924 under the title Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (in English: Thalassa). Here, he theorizes not only genitality, but the genitals themselves. With the morphology of reproductive organs as a point of departure, Thalassa takes us through time and space, speculating that the physiological side of genitality must be understood as the belated abreaction of a series of phylogenetic catastrophes. This contribution offers a new frame for reading Thalassa, challenging the common perception that the phylogenetic speculation in Ferenczi and Freud sought to provide psychoanalysis with a natural scientific foundation. Instead, Ferenczi deconstructs precisely such foundational claims: he reads his sources from nineteenth-century popular biology against the grain and draws upon diverging psychoanalytic notions of hysteria to destabilize popular evolutionary narratives. Read against the backdrop of its time, Ferenczian ‘bioanalysis’ holds the potential for a political intervention against biologism and eugenic thought. His methodology breaks with the dream of a transparent language in what is today called the hard sciences.