ABSTRACT
Ferenczi accompanied Freud and Jung to America, and the crossing was an opportunity for the first “reciprocal” group psychoanalysis: while the voyage marked the first sign of Jung’s withdrawal, for Ferenczi, it deepened an intimate, happy, and troubled relationship with the master. In order to understand the incompatibility between Freud and Jung, the author compares the two paradigmatic forms - one more conflictual, the other more associated with mourning - assumed by the infantile sexual fantasy and curiosity about the primary scene, at the centre of their personal psychic development and the construction of their theories: in Freud, the childhood memory of crying desperately in front of the empty cellar with the subsequent finding of the mother and the Irma dream; in Jung, the memory of the corpse in the washhouse and the dream of the house with the two skulls in the cellar.
In America, there was an informal meeting with William James and Stanley Hall about the performances of a medium. On their return, Freud and Ferenczi together began an impassioned project of research into the work of seers and how they “read” the unconscious thoughts of those who consult them.
