ABSTRACT
For Ferenczi, the most important requirement for the psychoanalyst is the candidate’s experience of his own analysis as a basis for practice, as that is the only way that the passage from knowledge to conviction can occur. For Ferenczi, an epistemic experience is not all that is required of the analyst prior to deciphering the unconscious; for the analyst, the dimension of the drive is central. Indeed, Ferenczi’s conception of the symptom as a social symptom also anticipates Lacan and he emphasises the importance of going through an experience that must be distinguished from hypnosis and suggestion. Ferenczi proposes that the renunciation of the pleasure taken in the phantasy is the condition of the treatment. While Lacan concluded decisively that in the transference the analyst comes into the place of the traumatic parent for Ferenczi it is not a question of repeating the initial experience as Freud maintained, but rather of returning in order to correct it.
