The Promises and Limitations of Relational-Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Returning to Ferenczi’s Legacy

In this chapter shows how Sándor Ferenczi built on Freud’s theory and technique while expanding it into an “active treatment” that combined working through in the therapeutic relationship in-session with behavioral experiments and “exposures” outside of sessions—interventions approved of by Freud. The chapter discusses two cases from Ferenczi’s posthumous Clinical Diary that were surprisingly preoccupied with race and trauma—an element of his work that has received little commentary in the literature. The cases show how Ferenczi addressed how perpetrators “cannibalize” their victims’ suffering to relieve their own, and extended this theory to understand racism as a cannibalistic enjoyment for the perpetrator. However, Ferenczi struggled to think beyond a “two-person” model of the therapeutic relationship, hobbling his ability to address the social in his clinical work—a difficulty that arguably persists in relational theory today (see Layton in De-idealizing relational theory, Routledge, pp. 209‒234). Foregrounding Lacan and Fanon’s positions, it can be argued that a third term is needed beyond the two-person relation—the social as it “slips through” speech.