A Scientific Meeting presented by Peter Rudnytsky, Ph.D.

Continued Education (CEU/CME): 1.5 credits

Event Price: Event is free. Optional CE fee is $10 members, $25 non-members. Students receive free CEs.

In Person and Virtual Options. Masks are optional.

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.

Learning Objectives

1. To situate Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Severn in a biographical, historical, and theoretical context

2. To show how Ferenczi and Freud exemplify divergent models of psychoanalytic identity

3. To rehabilitate Elizabeth Severn as an original thinker and partner in the work of Ferenczi’s final phase

Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs as well as Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality for APsaA. From 2001 to 2011, he was Editor of American Imago. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including JAPA and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, he is currently Editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge and Co-Editor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series for Bloomsbury. His most recent books are Formulated Experiences: Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm (2019) and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022), which builds on his 2017 edition of Elizabeth Severn’s The Discovery of the Self, originally published in 1933.