ABSTRACT
Among the many objections analysands offer to the fundamental rule in psychoanalysis, Ferenczi (1919/1976) reported on patients who have difficulty distinguishing between thinking and doing: To think or say it is to risk doing it. For example, a patient might be hesitant to report being angry at someone, fearing that discussion presages loss of control. With developmental immaturity (whether arrest or regression), thought or impulse soon becomes action. Such patients had not reached the level of mature thought, which Freud (1911/1958) described as trial work or experimental action. To look at something intrapsychically does not mean that we have to leap interpersonally. Displaying the same diagnostic naivete that led Freud to regard the Wolf-Man as neurotic, and having no access to an “expert diagnostic consultant” (Weiner, 1972), Ferenczi dismissed the matter cavalierly: “We can reassure these overanxious folk that this fear is only a reminiscence of childhood when they actually were not capable of such a differentiation” (1976, p. 93).
