Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma

Published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2024, Volume 93, Number 3. Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma: A Relational Neurobiological Perspective. By Arnold Wm. Rachman and Clara Mucci. New York: Routledge, 2023, 261 pp. $160 hardcover, $39.94 softcover.

It has been ninety years since Sándor Ferenczi died and yet even in death his writings continue to touch so many of us. His legacy can be detected—even when not fully acknowledged—in everyday clinical concepts like empathy, introjection, embodiment, dissociation, multiple self-states, and, of course, countertransference—all widely accepted ideas that were originally dismissed by many of his colleagues, not least of whom was Freud. These days references to Ferenczi’s work can be found everywhere. One might reasonably wonder if there is much more to say. Arnold Rachman and Clara Mucci, authors of Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma: A Relational Neurobiological Perspective, clearly think so and they have written a book that helps to shed further light on this gifted, intuitive, and, at times, misunderstood psychoanalytic thinker.

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