Ferenczi’s Revolutionary Therapeutic Approach*

Abstract

Many of the revolutionary principles introduced by Ferenczi in his clinical practice have now been widely accepted especially in the field of trauma and trauma therapy. Examples of these innovative views include his emphasis on empathy as opposed to technical neutrality and his stress on the real conditions of child caring and family environmental deficits and on the consequences of interpersonal violence and abuse that lead to "identification with the aggressor" by the victim thereby resulting in the internalization of both aggressiveness and guilt (the split guilt of the abuser). The resulting "fragmentation" of the personality, which is now considered dissociation (instead of Freud's "repression"), is at the root of several severe disorders, characterized by distortion of reality, loss of touch with one's body and loss of trust in the other. Therefore "abreaction is not enough". A new, positive relational experience must be re-inscribed at the level of implicit memory.

Traumatic effects beyond diagnosis: The impact of dissociation on the mind–body–brain system.

“…In order to understand the neurobiological consequences of trauma of human agency and the following destructive psychodynamics, distinguishing them from natural catastrophes and also to help clarify possible cumulative effects and influences between one level and the other, we can distinguish the following three levels of trauma of human agency (Mucci, 2013(Mucci, , 2014(Mucci, , 2017(Mucci, , 2018a(Mucci, , 2018b(Mucci, , 2019.…”

“…During past years, there has been an increased and renovated interest in trauma-related disorders and its phenomena. Departing from the historical denial of trauma related effects in psychoanalysis and moving toward the recent developments (and differences) between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual-2 (PDM-2; Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2017), we will focus particularly on the phenomena of dissociation as a response to trauma of human hand and its neuropsychodynamic effects on the mind-body-brain system (Mucci, 2017(Mucci, , 2018a(Mucci, , 2018b.…”

Spontaneous Brain Activity Predicts Task-Evoked Activity During Animate Versus Inanimate Touch

“…Several studies show the sensitivity of the self to naturalistic environments as featured by animate stimuli (Adolphs 1999;New et al 2007;Sui et al 2012). For instance, interactions with animate stimuli (as distinguished from inanimate ones) are of crucial importance for a healthy development of the self and its neural underpinnings (Schore 2000;Rakison and Poulin-Dubois 2001;Trevarthen and Aitken 2001;Pfeifer and Peake 2012;Mucci 2017). Moreover, early life social experiences related to the animate environment impact the spatiotemporal structure of the brain's spontaneous activity even during later adulthood (Bluhm et al 2009;Nakao et al 2013;Duncan et al 2015).…”

Is Our Self Related to Personality? A Neuropsychodynamic Model

“…(Kohut ( 1971 ) conceptualized how a failure in the development of a cohesive sense of the self, depending from the interaction with the environment, leads to a fragmentation of the body, self, mind and the self-object. Recently, several authors, departing from the background of the attachment theory (Schore, 2000 , 2001 , 2012 ; Lyons-Ruth, 2003 , 2008 ; Fonagy et al, 2007 ; Mucci, 2013 , 2017 ; Beebe and Lachmann, 2014 ), proposed that the parent-infant dyad can be considered as the first intersubjective encounter that predisposes the development of the self and emphasized how the dual caregiver–infant exchange continuously modulates the formation of the growing subject, organizing the mind-body-brain interoceptive and exteroceptive connections in relation to the other.…”