12/29/2022
Sándor Ferenczi on his use of "play-analysis" in the treatment of adults:
"I was soon forced to admit to myself and to the patient that many of the serious realities of childhood were concealed in this play ... in which they enacted before me traumatic occurrences, the unconscious memory of which lay in fact behind the dialogue of the game.
This process gives us an opportunity of observing something of the mechanism of the genesis of a trauma. First, there is the entire paralysis of all spontaneity, including all activity of thought. … If we succeed in making contact with the patient even in these phases, we shall find that, when a child feels himself abandoned, he loses, as it were, all desire for life or, as we should have to say with Freud, he turns his aggressive impulses against himself.
Sometimes this process goes so far that the patient begins to have the sensations of sinking and dying. He will turn deadly pale, or fall into a condition like fainting, or there may be a general increase in muscular tension … What we see taking place here is the reproduction of the mental and physical agony produced by incomprehensible and intolerable woe.
I will just remark in passing that these 'dying' patients also sometimes tell me interesting things about the next world and the nature of existence after death"
"Child-Analysis in the Analysis of Adults" (IJPA, 1931): ▶️
https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.012.0468A
Image / From the book, "The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor. Edited By Adrienne Harris & Steven Kuchuck. Routledge.
