ABSTRACT
Right up to the present day the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi has been a difficult one for psychoanalysis. The relationship between Freud and Ferenczi was one of friendship and of controversy—and psychoanalysis was always interwoven; psychoanalysis as theory, technique, and movement, but also as a personal experience. As if present-day psychoanalysts with all their training, their personal analysis and supervision, and with all the theoretical and technical equipment that have since been provided, find it any easier to achieve optimal separation or optimal fusion between their professional and private lives. Ferenczi’s concept of trauma is complementary to that of Freud. Whereas Freud concentrated on discovering the intrapsychic happenings, Ferenczi centred on the individual’s relationship to the reality around him, and investigated the different ways in which the organism responds to the changing environment—be it in phylogenetic speculation in Thalassa.
