Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1933) (Part II)

In the article’s second half, Ferenczi “report[s] on some new ideas” (161) occasioned by his basic discovery in technique and the heightened intimacy it nourished. These new ideas relate above all to “sexual trauma…as the pathogenic factor” (161) — a restriction of Ferenczi’s focus from “trauma” in some more generic sense. He begins, in fact, simply by reiterating the reality of this abuse: “children…fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose” (161). And this, of course, is a revival of Freud’s original “seduction theory,” later discarded in favor of a theory of the child’s “fantasy” life. Ferenczi address the controversy directly:

“The immediate explanation — that these are only sexual fantasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying — is unfortunately made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g. of assaults upon children, committed by patients actually in analysis” (161)

After insisting on the reality, and unsuspected frequency, of sexual abuse, Ferenczi continues to specify the characteristics of this abuse — of the adult and child in their interaction — and in a way that gradually enriches the proposed analogy between the traumatic setting and the (orthodox) analytic one.

It is here, in fact, that the “confusion of tongues” named in the article’s title makes its first appearance. Ferenczi represents sexual abuse as substantially, though not exclusively, a type of mutual misunderstanding or “confusion” based on two, incommensurable languages or “tongues”: the child’s and the adult’s. The child’s language is defined by “playful fantasy” and, though this fantasy “may assume erotic forms,” the whole production “remains…on the level of tenderness” (161). Ferenczi provides only one illustration here: the child’s commonplace “fantasy of taking the role of the mother to the adult” (161). He does not elaborate upon the “erotic forms” taken by this tender-minded play, but they presumably include fantasies of physical contact and intimacy.

By contrast, the adult’s language of “passion” does not remain at this level of tenderness; nor does he construe the child’s language as essentially tender play, but as a “dialect” of his own, passionate language. These disturbed adults “mistake the play of children for the desires of a sexually mature person” (161), and catastrophically act upon that mistake .

Ferenczi now identifies some of the reasons that, contrary to our natural expectations, the child does not resist the adult’s violation or express “hatred, disgust and energetic refusal” (161). Instead, “paralyzed by enormous anxiety” and feeling “physically and morally helpless,” mentally and emotionally undeveloped children will “subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor” (162). Some such experience, we gather, explains that emotional-interpersonal virtuosity Frerenczi ascribed earlier to certain patients. This virtuosity now appears in a new light: as the particular survival skill demanded of that patient by the original trauma. So far as the child inuits, only such a strategy — of comprehensive subordination to an adult “will” which must, for that reason, be immediately deciphered in all its sophistication — will save his or her life.

There is evidently a logical sequence involved. (a) Sensing danger, I realize that, to survive, I must make myself a function of the adult will. But (b) this is impossible for me to the degree that this adult will — the mature language of “passion” — remains opaque. Therefore, under this pressure, I (c) spontaneously unseal the suite of abilities that ordinarily do not emerge until adulthood. Later, Ferenczi canvasses this phenomenon as

“the sudden, surprising rise of new faculties after a trauma…Great need, and more especially mortal anxiety, seem to possess the power to waken up suddenly and to put into operation latent dispositions which, un-cathected, waited in deepest quietude for their development” (164-165)

He grounds these actions in “identification” and “introjection”: two operations that make the overwhelming trauma emotionally manageable and thus permit the needed adaptation. On the one hand, once introjected or absorbed as as an inner, “intrapsychic” object, the threatening adult can be confront and controlled “in fantasy,” an option unavailable “in realty,” while “as a rigid external reality” (162) the adult “ceases to exist” (162). On the other hand, the child “identifies” with the adult. She does this not, in the first instance, in the sense of “imitating” the adult’s demeanor. (After all, if the adult is aggressive and menacing, it would hardly make existential sense for a child to embody these qualities, given the context.) Rather she identifies with the adult, again, in the sense of conforming to the adult’s will, thus feeling and behaving in ways that “correspond” to those of the adult (without necessarily “mimicking” them). Once again, this adaptation explains, years afterwards, the intuitive “powers” of Ferenczi’s patients:

“The fear of an uninhibited, almost mad adult changes the child, so to speak, into a psychiatrist and, in order to become one and to defend himself against the dangers coming from people without self-control, he must know how to identify himself completely with them” (165)

Among the devastating psychological consequences of this trauma for the child and future-patient, two in particular stand out. First, Ferenczi cites “the introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult” (162), an action enabled by the child’s magnified sensitivity and induced, it seems, by the adult’s need to delegate his own intolerable guilt to the victim. Second, the child’s “confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken” (162). This consequence again throws light on the situation of Ferenczi’s patients, who seemed unaware either of their critical perceptions of the analyst (his coldness and cruelty) or their feelings in reaction to these perceptions (fear, anger, and hurt). Only in regressed states would the patient gain access to these.

To survive, then, the traumatized child disavowed her own perceptions and feelings: only those consistent with the adult’s will, with which she now identified, “counted” for anything. Ferenczi’s patient has, it seems, conserved into adulthood this systematic mistrust of her own experience and, conversely, a systematic deference to those of the “adult,” or analyst. Indeed, Ferenczi’s very language here, that trauma has broken the child’s “confidence,” echos his earlier description of his new clinical desideratum: “the admission of the analyst’s error produced confidence in his patient.” In other words, it is experiential “confidence” that the traumatized child has lost; and it is just this confidence that well-conducted, honest analysis restores.

Unsurprisingly, Ferenczi roots the article’s heterodoxy in Freud’s own thought, albeit from an early phase:  “Here we must revert to some of the ideas developed by Freud a long time ago according to which the capacity for object-love must be preceded by a stage of identification” (163). Ferenczi conceives this initial “identification” stage — through which children must pass on their way to mature, sexual, and “passionate” object-love — as marked by “passive object-love or of tenderness” (163, my italics). But in calling this necessary childhood experience a tender “stage of identification,” Ferenczi qualifies an impression left (at least in this reader) earlier in the article. For initially, Ferenczi seems to present “identification” as a suis generis defense mechanism activated in the child by traumatic experience. According to this recent qualification, however, “identification” rather names the child’s first, basic orientation towards the world — not necessarily a defensive one — in all situations. Thus the child’s spontaneous “identification with the aggressor” in threatening moments is not some new existential strategy, but an extreme, pathological instance of her basic comportment.

In the concluding pages, Ferenczi deepens his account of the difference between the child’s tenderness and the adult’s passion — their distinct causes and qualities. While we may detect intimations of adult object-love in the child’s original identifications, these are in fact present “only in a playful way in fantasies” (163). This early fantasizing is unmistakably Oedipal, “the hidden play of taking the place of the parent of the same sex in order to be married to the other parent” (163). Nevertheless, “it must be stressed that this is merely fantasy; in reality the children would not want to, in fact, they cannot do without tenderness” (163-164). Inseparable from the “tenderness” of this stage, then, is the place of fantasy in opposition to reality. This tenderness can survive only where adults honor this opposition, or insulate child’s free fantasizing from real “consequences.” Here Ferenczi cites harsh punishment as one way in which adults dishonor this vital opposition:

“The playful trespasses of the child are raised to serious reality only by the passionate, often infuriated, punitive sanctions and lead to depressive states in the child who, until then, felt blissfully guiltless” (164).

This last quote enlarges our understanding of tenderness. For it is not merely any reality from which the child’s tender fantasies must be protected. It is specifically the adult’s “passion” — which, on the evidence, involves converting fantasy into reality, “enacting” it — that traumatizes the child by, among other things, introducing the awareness of guilt. Though Ferenczi doesn’t put things in just this way, the idea seems to be: so long as the child’s fantasy is insulated from reality, no real “guilt” can arise. In this context, guilt presupposes an awareness that fantasy can and does incur negative, potentially destructive consequences — precisely the awareness from which adults ordinarily protect the child. Similarly, sexual abuse involves “the precocious super-imposition of love, passionate and guilt-laden on an immature guiltless child” (164). In either case, traumatic contact with adult “passion” robs the child of her tender “innocence.” It does this, first, by suspending the boundary separating fantasy and reality that otherwise protected her; and second, by inducing the child to “introject” the adult’s guilt-feelings related to the abuse.