ISFN Weekend Webinars

Introduction

After the successful 13th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference in Florence, Italy, the ISFN had planned to host the next International Ferenczi Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, in May of 2021. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our plans for in-person meetings had to be postponed. Despite these challenges, our desire to bring clinicians, scholars, researchers, students and colleagues together for stimulating and interdisciplinary discussions had not diminished. As a result, the ISFN decided to develop and offer a new 2021 Webinar series that will make use of Ferenczi’s work to examine the many social, personal, political, environmental and clinical disruptions we have all had to endure recently.

Ferenczi, more so than Freud, was interested in understanding how environmental stimuli impacted the self and, conversely, how aspects of the self could be projected onto the external environment. He perceived the developing self as being influenced by the dynamic interaction of introjective and projective processes, and he saw how one’s projections could also influence one’s external environment. More broadly, Ferenczi’s vision of this mutual influence could be applied to societal events in the sense that these events are able to influence self development, and in turn, an individual can also influence society. Today we are facing many of the same challenges that our psychoanalytic forebears faced over a century ago: war, pandemic, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, abuse, and conspiracies of silence and oppression. Ferenczi has provided us with many tools to explore the dynamic forces that affect our psyches, our society, and our culture. Perhaps applying his principles to our analysis of these crises may lead us to a more enlightened navigation of the inevitable catastrophes confronting our species.

This new Webinar series will explore such contemporary issues as the authoritarian personality, the phenomenon of Trumpism and mass hypnosis, the collusion of silence and socio-political denial, how a pandemic impacts clinical work, trauma theory in traumatic times, and gender theory during the #MeToo movement.