ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Severn began her clinical career in 1908, about the same time as Sandor Ferenczi met Sigmund Freud. Their meeting began his training to become a psychoanalyst. Severn became interested in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis as both fields began to develop in the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Her pre-analytic period of clinical experience involved many cases referred by physicians who had little psychological sophistication, not being attuned to the emotional difficulties that accompany organic illness. The Ferenczi/Severn analysis was not only a pioneering treatment of a trauma disorder, but a training analysis performed by a senior analyst for an analytic candidate who was undergoing training to be a psychoanalyst. The paradigm shift in conceptualizing the analyst as a human being parallels Ferenczi's idea of the analyst as a healer. Ferenczi introduced clinical empathy into psychoanalysis in his 1928 paper, in which he named Severn as a collaborator.
