Sandor Ferenczi: a forerunner of the modern Psychiatry

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Andrea Giovannoni
Publishing Year 2024 Issue 2024/1
Language Italian Pages 9 P. 105-113 File size 172 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSP2024-001007
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The author describes the case of a young patient, very compromised personally and socially with several suicide attempts, numerous admis-sions to the SPDC and a diagnosis of Paranoid Disorder.Despite the se-riousness of the clinical picture, the author illustrates how he managed to work therapeutically with him for many years following the Ferenczi relational approach. For Ferenczi the therapist must leave aside profes-sional hypocrisies, authoritarian positions, oracular rhetoric, interpreta-tive fanaticism and, rather, must succeed in communicating with his technique a climate of sincere and authentic emotional acceptance of the suffering patient, to create with tact and empathy an analytical rec-iprocity and mutual interdependence. These Ferenczian technique di-rections allow the relationship to consolidate as a warm maternal envi-ronment in which the patient can begin to experience the feeling of trust in the other. The patient’s feeling of trust in the therapist, and vice versa, will activate the transformative process. The clinical case de-scribed by the author bears witness to the evolutionary transformation that occurred in the process. While “false hopes of rebirth” in new and improbable arrogant, manic and hypertrophic identities emerged from the first dreams, the patient gradually came to produce a dream that marks a fundamental evolutionary transition, a dream that the patient himself describes as one of hope.

Keywords: empaty, reciprocity, transparency, therapeutic humility, principle of concession, trust.

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Andrea Giovannoni, Sandor Ferenczi: un antesignano della moderna psichiatria in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 1/2024, pp 105-113, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2024-001007