Ferenczi’s Secret Life: Mutual Analysis as a Relational Paradigm

Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. Routinely attacked by conservative commentators as a boundary violation and an exploitation of the patient, Rudnytsky defends Ferenczi’s experiment on both counts and argues that mutual analysis serves as a paradigm for the two-person model of relational analysis, as Freud’s self-analysis is a paradigm for the one-person model of classical analysis. Ferenczi’s return to Freud’s pre-1897 (misnamed) “seduction theory,” and his concomitant modifications of therapeutic technique, caused him to go underground and develop a “secret life” from Freud in a way that has until recently been necessary for trauma theorists.

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