ABSTRACT
Sandor Ferenczi contributed many ideas that have had a remarkable impact on the construction of the psychoanalytic corpus. For Ferenczi, the metapsychological complexity of traumatic situations was not simply a matter of traumatisms linked to the sexual or fantasy-related "seduction" of a child; it was the outcome of a trauma that had occurred early in infancy, and in some cases before the acquisition of speech. In order to assess the importance of Ferenczi's contribution, it is necessary to summarize the history of how the concept of traumatism developed in Freud's work up to the point where Ferenczi put his own ideas forward. For Sigmund Freud, from the very beginnings of the psychoanalytic corpus, the aetiology of his patients' neuroses involved past traumatic experiences. Psychoanalysis grew out of the seduction theory, which, in its initial stages, equated seduction with a sexual traumatism brought about by an external object.
