Sándor Ferenczi and his contribution to the understanding of trauma

Name: Sándor Ferenczi and his contribution to the understanding of trauma
Start: 2024-10-04T18:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-10-05T17:00:00+02:00
Location: Gjerdrums vei 19, 0484 Oslo, Norway

Schedule

Fri Oct 04 2024 at 06:00 pm to Sat Oct 05 2024 at 05:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Gjerdrums vei 19, 0484 Oslo, Norway | Oslo, OS

The Sándor Ferenczi Society in Budapest and Institute of Psychotherapy in Oslo are inviting to a seminar-serie on Sándor Ferenczi, the great Hungarian psychoanalyst. He was the nearest friend and collaborator of Sigmund Freud, though their relation underwent severe stresses during the last years of Ferenczi’s life.
There are many reasons for doing this work now. In Norway Ferenczi’s ideas has been of important influence on the Institute of psychotherapy, especially through the influences of the interpersonal and relational trends in American psychoanalysis.
The “Confusion of Tongues”- article has been a standard repertoire in the curriculum. But this seminar series will deepen the importance of Ferenczi in Norway and the whole psychoanalytic world far beyond this.
Ferenczi co-operated with Freud from 1908 and wrote many articles which are still part of the “mainstream” psychoanalytical theory and clinical observation. E.g. his understanding of the role of projection and introjection in the transference, his ideas of the importance of the early mother-child relationship, his new trauma theory, and the new perspective on psychosomatics.
Ferenczi’s idea was to create an international psychoanalytic organization, and thus the IPA was shaped in 1910.
After the World War I he was co-author on a book on war traumas. And later Ferenczi revised Freuds theory on childhood traumas and created a new understanding of it, cf. including the concept of “identification with the agressor".
Sándor Ferenczi analyzed several of the leading persons in the psychoanalytic community, among them Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Michael Balint, Clara Thompson. He inspired Klein – and several of his colleagues in Budapest - to start analyzing children. Later he expanded his views to focus on the child in the adult patient, still a useful concept when treating more disturbed patients. Ferenczi focuses on attachment (long before Bowlby) and establishment of a true object relations way of thinking, both as to children’s growth, and the phenomena in the
clinical setting. His thoughts have been further elaborated by Klein, Winnicott, Balint, Bion etc.
Many of these topics will be studied in the seminar series. But last – and not least – his lifelong searching for doing analysis and therapy with the most severe cases, and how this made him use controversial methods (e.g., mutual analysis). Freud said in 1933
about Ferenczi: “He had probably set himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out of reach today.” But today Ferenczi’s experiment still have inspiring value to most therapists and analysts.
There are in total 4 seminars: two in Oslo and two in Budapest. The coming seminar is the 3rd.
1. Introduction, Oslo 25-27th of November 2022
2. Early object relations, Budapest 7-9 th of June 2023
3. Trauma, Oslo, 4-5th of October 2024
4. The early mother-child relation and its psychosomatics, Budapest 25-26 of April 2025.
Program third seminar
Friday 4th of October
18.00-20.00
Welcome
Judit Mészáros
Ferenczi’s identification with the aggressor – in today's perspective at individual, community, and societal levels
Moderator: Dóra Lőrik
Reception after the lecture
*
Saturday 5th of October
10.00-11.45
Noémi Ford
Trauma of immigration
Moderator: Tomas Linhart
12.00-13.30: Lunch
13.30-15.30: Clinical groups
15.30-16.00: Break
16.00-17.00:
Leif Jonny Mandelid
To listen to the language of the heart: The legacy of Sandor Ferenczi
Moderator: Ole Johan Finnøy
17.00-17.30 Discussion
Participation fee: NOK3500 (€300, western countries) or €80 (eastern countries)
How to register?
E-mail [email protected] before the 7th of September 2024.
*
Guest lectures:
Judit Mészáros
Ph.D., habil., professor honoris causa.
Mészáros is a training and supervising analyst of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society (affiliated with the IPA) and staff member at the European Psychotherapy Training Institute in Budapest. She has written scores of papers, editor or author of books, curator of exhibitions of Ferenczi and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis in London and Budapest, and expert of film on Sándor Ferenczi, in 2001.
J. Mészáros and C. Bonomi were the authors of the Ferenczi House Project which was completed with the purchase of Ferenczi's official office and created the opportunity for the establishing of the House/Center and Archives in 2011. One of her books: Ferenczi
and Beyond. Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic. Movement during the Nazi Years. Published by Karnac Books, 2014. She is the co-founder, now the president of the Sándor Ferenczi Society; Executive Board Member of the International Sándor Ferenczi Network, and psychoanalyst/psychotherapist in private practice.
Dóra Lőrik
Clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst
Member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), Sándor Ferenczi Society.
Ms. Lőrik has extensive clinical experience providing short- and long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy in various psychiatric hospitals in Hungary. Additionally, Ms. Lőrik has been a lecturer at Wesley Janos Academy, Budapest, and at Eotvos Lorant University, Budapest (ELTE). She is currently in private practice in Budapest.
Noémi Ford, PsyD.
Clinical psychologist, Advanced psychoanalytic candidate at Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis.
Member and Chair of the Candidates’ Outreach Committee at APA Division 39, Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, the Physicians for Human Rights,
and of the Sándor Ferenczi Society. Adjunct Faculty at Carver School of Medicine at the University of Iowa and is the founding and clinical director of the Iowa Refugee Counseling Center.
She has extensive clinical experience working with immigrants and refugees, supervising graduate students, and providing presentations on the topics of immigration and psychotherapy.
Leif Jonny Mandelid
is a clinical psychologist with almost forty years of experience in mental health services and a member of Institute of Psychotherapy in Oslo. He is a private practitioner and in charge of an
educational program in psychotherapy with psychosis. He has written several papers and book chapters on the treatment of serious mental illness. He lectures extensively on the same
subjects. During his whole career the tradition after Ferenczi has been a source of inspiration and help to him in his work with patients with a history of early relational trauma and psychosis. Especially how too strong premature reliance on verbal and rational interventions run the risk of serious empathic failure. Instead, a stronger reliance on the preverbal language of the emotional
unconscious is recommended, both to avoid and repair empathic failure.