The Sándor Ferenczi Society in Budapest and Institute of Psychotherapy in Oslo are inviting to a seminar-serie on Sándor Ferenczi, the great Hungarian psychoanalyst. He was the nearest friend and collaborator of Sigmund Freud, though their relation underwent severe stresses during the last years of Ferenczi’s life.

There are many reasons for doing this work now. In Norway Ferenczi’s ideas has been of important influence on the Institute of psychotherapy, especially through the influences of the interpersonal and relational trends in American psychoanalysis.

The “Confusion of Tongues”- article has been a standard repertoire in the curriculum. But this seminar series will deepen the importance of Ferenczi in Norway and the whole psychoanalytic world far beyond this.

Ferenczi co-operated with Freud from 1908 and wrote many articles which are still part of the “mainstream” psychoanalytical theory and clinical observation. E.g. his understanding of the role of projection and introjection in the transference, his ideas of the importance of the early mother-child relationship, his new trauma theory, and the new perspective on psychosomatics.

Ferenczi’s idea was to create an international psychoanalytic organization, and thus the IPA was shaped in 1910.

After the World War I he was co-author on a book on war traumas. And later Ferenczi revised Freuds theory on childhood traumas and created a new understanding of it, cf. including the concept of “identification with the agressor».

Sándor Ferenczi analyzed several of the leading persons in the psychoanalytic community, among them Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Michael Balint, Clara Thompson. He inspired Klein – and several of his colleagues in Budapest – to start analyzing children. Later he expanded his views to focus on the child in the adult patient, still a useful concept when treating more disturbed patients. Ferenczi focuses on attachment (long before Bowlby) and establishment of a true object relations way of thinking, both as to children’s growth, and the phenomena in the clinical setting. His thoughts have been further elaborated by Klein, Winnicott, Balint, Bion etc.

Many of these topics will be studied in the seminar series. But last – and not least – his lifelong searching for doing analysis and therapy with the most severe cases, and how this made him use controversial methods (e.g., mutual analysis). Freud said in 1933 about Ferenczi: “He had probably set himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out of reach today.” But today Ferenczi’s experiment still have inspiring value to most therapists and analysts.

There are in total 4 seminars: two in Oslo and two in Budapest. The coming seminar is the 3rd.

1. Introduction, Oslo 25-27th of November 2022
2. Early object relations, Budapest 7-9 th of June 2023
3. Trauma, Oslo, 4-5th of October 2024
4. The early mother-child relation and its psychosomatics, Budapest 25-26 of April 2025.

Program third seminar

Friday 4th of October

18.00-20.00
Welcome
Judit Mészáros
Ferenczi’s identification with the aggressor – in today’s perspective at individual, community, and societal levels

Moderator: Dóra Lőrik

Reception after the lecture

*

Saturday 5th of October

10.00-11.45
Noémi Ford
Trauma of immigration

Moderator: Tomas Linhart

12.00-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.30: Clinical groups

15.30-16.00: Break

16.00-17.00:
Leif Jonny Mandelid
To listen to the language of the heart: The legacy of Sandor Ferenczi

Moderator: Ole Johan Finnøy

17.00-17.30 Discussion

Participation fee: NOK3500 (€300, western countries) or €80 (eastern countries)

How to register?
E-mail sekr@instpsyk.no before the 7th of September 2024.