ABSTRACT
Sandor Ferenczi’s interest in the work of Pierre Janet preceded his encounter with Sigmund Freud, and continued all through his life. However, Janet’s influence on Ferenczi has hardly been discussed in psychoanalytic journals. In fact, Janet’s dissociation had directly influenced Eugen Bleuler in his development of the classical concept of splitting in schizophrenia. A difficulty in recognizing Janet’s influence on object relations theory arose from Fairbairn’s use of the term splitting instead of dissociation. The chapter argues that, despite Freud’s “anti-Janet stand”, Ferenczi started the first attempt at a theoretical synthesis of the models of Janet’s and Freud’s in psychoanalysis. Many psychoanalysts have witnessed in their daily work dissociative phenomena, and some of them, such as Ferenczi and Ronald Fairbairn, wanted to acknowledge this by integrating it within psychoanalytic theory. Fairbairn’s interest in Janet dates back to his doctoral thesis in Medicine, titled “Dissociation and repression”.
