ABSTRACT
Sandor Ferenczi’s often radical ideas, greatly admired by some, were questionable to many. However, numerous aspects of them have gained credibility, not only as part of the foundation of object relations and relational therapies, but in certain ideas of Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and other contemporary psychoanalysts. This chapter explores some of the intuitions with which Ferenczi struggled mightily in the early 1930s, their prescience as well as their similarities and differences in regard to Bion’s work particularly. It shows how aspects of Ferenczi’s concept of the “astra”, perhaps his most daring and mysterious idea, are reflected in Bion’s equally mysterious concept of “O”. Ferenczi’s attempts to describe this new territory of the psychic qualities of infants led him to the idea of the trauma suffered by children whose inner lives went unrecognised by the mother due to mental illness or neglect.
