Jay Frankel

Exploring Ferenczi's Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life, and the Therapeutic Relationship

When we feel overwhelmed by an inescapable threat, we “identify with the aggressor” (Ferenczi, 1933). Hoping to survive, we sense and “become” precisely what the attacker expects of us—in our behavior, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. Identification with the aggressor is closely coordinated with other responses to trauma, including dissociation. Over the long run, it can become habitual and can lead to masochism, chronic hypervigilance, and other personality distortions. But habitual identification with the aggressor also frequently occurs in people who have not suffered severe trauma, which raises the possibility that certain events not generally considered to constitute trauma are often experienced as traumatic. Following Ferenczi, I suggest that emotional abandonment or isolation, and being subject to a greater power, are such events. In addition, identification with the aggressor is a tactic typical of people in a weak position; as such, it plays an important role in social interaction in general.

Ferenczi's Trauma Theory

Ferenczis Trauma Theory Jay B. Frankel, Ph.D. Trauma was at the heart of Sandor Ferenczis clinical concerns. Toward the end of his life, he became convinced that trauma was an important cause of much neurotic and character pathology, despite the fact that traumatic factors were generally neglected by other analysts (1933, p. 156).’ Ferenczis final ideas about trauma were presented in very brief form—“a short extract” (1933, p. 156), as he said—in his final paper, “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child.” He intended to expand, develop, and reevaluate these ideas (Balint, 1958), but soon after he wrote this paper he became too ill to do so, and after several months he died. However, Ferenczi had published other papers that dealt with trauma, notably during the First World War on “war neurosis” (1916/17), and much later in his papers on relaxation technique (1929, 1930, 1931). In his last years, he also made many notes to himself on his ideas about trauma, among other topics, which were posthumously gathered together and published in the third volume of his collected papers (1955) under the title, “Notes and Fragments” (1920 and 1930-1932). These “Notes and Fragments” flank his Clinical Diary (1932), which was written between January and October 1932 but not published until 1985 (and not until 1988 in English), and which contains many additional clinical observations and ideas about trauma. The present paper will attempt to bring together all of Ferenczis writings about trauma and to present them in a concise, integrated, and organized way.

Identification and “Traumatic Aloneness”: Reply to Commentaries by Berman and Bonomi

To anchor my response to three issues raised by Berman and Bonomi, I rely on Ferenczis concept of “traumatic aloneness.” First, I agree with both discussants that identification often has constructive and life-creating effects, but I suggest that it may generally arise in response to (sometimes hidden) anxiety, specifically about separation or aloneness. Second, I examine what Ferenczi termed “introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult”—trauma victims frequently feel that they are “bad”—and explore this complex feeling both as an effort to preserve others as good objects and as a way to protect oneself from a frightening aggressor. Finally, I consider the idea that trauma leads to partial psychic death. While I think it is clinically dangerous to assume that trauma can cause the actual, permanent destruction of part of the personality—this assumption can lead to unwarranted therapeutic pessimism—trauma certainly often carries the subjective experience of partial death or dying. The therapeutic effort to undo dissociations and achieve authenticity and intimacy can be thought of as rediscovering ones aliveness through the process of sharing it with someone.

A Witness Breaks His Silence: The Meaning of a Therapist's Response to an Adolescent's Self-Destruction

I describe the case of a self-mutilating adolescent girl and my dilemma, as her therapist, about telling her parents about her self-abuse. I use two complementary, mutually enhancing relational theories of trauma—Ferenczis (1933) and Davies and Frawleys (1994)—to help understand the minefield I was in. Davies and Frawley describe certain relational configurations that are typical of trauma victims. I believe that it is not only unavoidable but therapeutically vital for therapists to participate in these configurations so they can know the patients experience in a personal way. It is also crucial that they be witnesses who provide recognition for the patients pain and, in so doing, relieve the intolerable feeling of isolation that Ferenczi proposed was the most basic trauma. In addition, I discuss the observation that some people who have not been previously traumatized in any gross way manifest characteristics of trauma.

FERENCZI’S EVOLVING CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISIC PATHOLOGY AND ITS BASIS IN TRAUMA*

Ferenczi’s landmark contributions to understanding and treating psychological trauma are inseparable from his evolving conception of narcissism, though he grasped their interrelationship only gradually. Ultimately, he saw narcissistic disorders as the result of how children cope with abuse or neglect, and their aftermath—they identify and comply with the needs of the aggressor, and later of people more generally, and dissociate their own needs, feelings, and perceptions; and they compensate for their submission and sacrifice of self by regressing to soothing omnipotent fantasies—which, ironically, may facilitate continued submission. Ferenczi’s experiments in technique were designed to help patients overcome their defensive retreat to omnipotent fantasies and regain their lost selves. His earliest experiment, active technique, in which he frustrated patients, was a direct attack on their clinging to omnipotent fantasy. But as he came to see such narcissistic personality distortions as a way of coping with the residue of early trauma, his focus shifted to the underlying trauma. His loving and indulgent relaxation technique was intended as an antidote to early emotional neglect. His final experiment, mutual analysis, characterized by the analyst’s openness and honesty in examining his own inevitable insincerities, was an attempt to heal the damage from parents’ hypocrisy about their mistreatment, which Ferenczi came to see as most destructive to the child.

The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans

The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission.

Two forms of solidarity: Their relation to the capacity to think and to alienation

Self-reflective thinking guards against the flight to authoritarian fantasies and leaders—a flight seen recently, for example, in the election of Donald Trump as US president. The capacity to think reflectively requires a sense of security which, if not internalized, can come from a feeling of belonging. But, if we need to belong to feel secure, how free are we to think differently from the group? I propose two types of solidarity—true solidarity, where a sense of universal kinship fosters compassion and a sense of responsibility for care that makes it important to reflect on what we do; and false solidarity, a shared paranoid/manic fantasy of superiority to a despised group, in which personal thinking threatens a brittle sense of belonging. Right-wing populism is a way to cope with anxieties about economic/cultural dispossession through such fantasies of superiority. But the Left has its own false solidarity—a manic bond that refuses empathy with the pain of the dispossessed on the Right, and even attacks those on the Left who are deemed insufficiently attentive to particular social justice issues. False solidarity is likely to evoke a complementary reaction—similar aggressive, resistant attitudes—in those it targets, resulting in a political impasse. But humility and active compassion may open the way to real dialogue.

Who to Be or Not to Be?: Commentary on Papers on President Clinton's Impeachment

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Sex, Lies, and Audiotape: Psychoanalysts Reflect on President Clinton's Impeachment

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