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Ferenczi's semiotic theory:

Previews of postmodernism
a b c
Adrienne Harris Ph.D. & Lewis Aron Ph.D.
a
Clinical Professor, New York University,
Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis
b
Clinical Professor and Supervisor, New York
University, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy
and Psychoanalysis
c
Clinical Professor and Supervisor, Adelphi
University, Derner Institute Postdoctoral Program in
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
Published online: 20 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Adrienne Harris Ph.D. & Lewis Aron Ph.D. (1997)
Ferenczi's semiotic theory: Previews of postmodernism, Psychoanalytic
Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 17:4, 522-534, DOI:
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 Ferenczi's Semiotic Theory: Previews
of Postmodernism
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A D R I E N N E H A R R I S , Ph.D.
L E W I S A R O N , Ph.D.

A T THE HEART OF PSYCHOANALYSIS is a brilliant, though paradoxical,

x x m y s t e r y built deep into the character of language and speech.
Through the apparently unplanned exchange of communication and
through dialogue, the internal mental landscape of at least one of the
speakers shifts and reorders. Psychoanalysis depends on the mutative
power of language and speech; it is "the talking therapy," and thus its
power and potential for healing relies on the instability of the distinc-
tion between words and action (Freud, 1904).
Much has been made of Sandor Ferenczi's fascination with tech-
nique, his involvement with clinical theory, and the phenomena in the
consulting room. He is often considered as a practice-driven, as
opposed to theory-driven, analyst (in contrast to Freud, so the stereo-
type goes).1 In this paper we argue that Ferenczi's clinical work is
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. is Clinical Professor, New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of
Relational Perspectives; and Coeditor, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi.
Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is Clinical Professor and Supervisor, New York University Postdoctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Adelphi University, Derner Institute
Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic
Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives; and Coeditor, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi.
This paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference of the Sandor Ferenczi Soci-
ety, "The Talking Therapy: Ferenczi and the Psychoanalytic Vocation," Budapest, July 20,
1993. Since that time, considerable new scholarship on Ferenczi has appeared, along with a vast
literature on psychoanalysis and postmodernism, which this paper, written in 1993, does not
encompass.
1
Elsewhere we have presented a reading of Ferenczi that emphasizes the consistency among
his implicit theories of mind, of development, of psychopathology, and of treatment (see Aron
and Harris, 1993).

522
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY • 523

imbued with ideas about language, symbolization, representation and

dialogue that prefigure the concept of "intersubjectivity." Ferenczi's
clinical ideas depend on a theoretically complex model of language,
and the interrelationship of thought and psychic structure, which has
much in common with contemporary and postmodern theories of the
symbolic or semiotic function. Ferenczi's implicit model of language
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process is more profoundly connected to postmodernism than the

models of symbolic representation used by Freud. This prefiguring of
postmodernism lies in Ferenczi's weaving together preverbal, enac-
tive, and verbal representations; his focus on language phenomena
right on the bridge of symbol and action; and his repudiation of a
single notion of representation and self state in favor of a vision of the
speaking patient and speaking analyst as a multiply voiced, multi-
selved complex of identities. Many aspects of Ferenczi's life long
preoccupations contribute to this implicit theory of language and the
symbolic function.
Among the contributions of postmodern thought is the insight that
our formulations of "truth" and "reality" are guided by, limited to, and
embedded within the system of language in which we live.2 Meanings
are multiple, unstable, and open to interpretation, always to be under-
stood within specific social, political, and historical contexts. Mean-
ing is socially constructed or negotiated between people, and there is
no essential meaning until we construct it by engaging in communica-
tion and dialogue with one another. Deconstructionist notions of liter-
ary interpretation deny that texts have a single fixed meaning. Texts
may generate a variety of meanings in excess of what is intended.
From this perspective, the psychoanalytic situation is a dialogic
conversation in which patient and analyst co-construct meaning and
interpretation and in which many pathways of meaning known and
unanticipated are possible.

2
The postmodern project challenges the subject-object dualism upon which the traditional
doctor-patient, scientist-observer, analyst-analysand relationship is based. Postmodernism
critiques the position of transcendent superiority assumed by the traditional scientist and doctor
and decenters the individual subject to focus on relational systems and networks. Feminist theo-
rists have utilized these philosophical developments to demonstrate the ways in which women
have been treated as other and as object, and feminist critics have elaborated on the ways in
which the subject—object dichotomy embedded within the male—female dichotomy marginalize
and devalue women (Benjamin, 1988; Butler, 1990).
 524 ADRIENNE HARRIS AND LEWIS ARON

In naming as a superordinate category "postmodernism," we

summarize many different and not always compatible traditions and
movements. In this work we are also leaning on some traditions in
philosophy, not necessarily part of, though often allied with, postmod-
ernism. Namely, we draw on an earlier hermeneutic tradition from the
Frankfort school and the philosophy of pragmatism stemming from
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Pierce and now most clearly represented in the work of Richard Rorty
(1993) and others committed to the principles of intersubjectivity, or
constructivism, in which the immediate and concrete experience of
reality is built and constructed through the activity and narrative
building activities of all participants.
Postmodernists, in contesting the centrality of a single voiced
authority, also undermine the notion of a naturally coherent subject
and instead privilege marginal voices and split selves. Postmodernism
is above all a system opposed to dichotomous thinking and in its avant
garde and literary wings it is a producer of playfulness, laughter and
wit, all Ferenczian characteristics.3 We have been influenced by two
of the most prominant postmodernists, Jacques Derrida and Julia
Kristeva. Derrida (1978) is the primary critic of the tendency in West-
ern thought to treat differences in terms of binary opposites, dichoto-
mous categories, perceived as mutually exclusive, oppositional, and
hierarchical. Derrida suggested that there is always some residue of
meaning, which has been relegated to the margins of the text, that
does not fit neatly into either alternative. In each pair, the terms are
defined in opposition to each other, and the first member of the pair is
privileged over the second. Derrida challenges both the opposition

'We also sec the relationship of Ferenczi's work to the semiotic and postmodern ideas of
Julia Kristeva. Kristeva (1980) has articulated a view of varieties and registers of speech that
constitute the complexities of identity, which she sees as an unstable structure fluidly expres-
sive of many aspects, self states, and voices. Her stance against centralized authorial or author-
itarian readings and interpretations, her sensitivity to the volatility and complexity of the shared
dialogues in the consulting room, and more recently her attunement to the anguish of fractured
identities in difficult or borderline cases would all be highly familiar and resonant for Ferenczi.
In particular, her re-reading of Lacan's great divide between the symbolic and the imaginary
into a more fluid, less dichotomous, less dramatically fissured distinction between the semiotic
and the symbolic would be right up Ferenczi's alley. In this formulation Kristeva also breaks
down the sharp distinction between word and deed, stressing instead the continuity and coexis-
tence of the sensuous materiality of speech and the formal abstract systems through which
language is constituted.
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY 525

between the terms and the hierarchy that is implied by demonstrating

that the two dichotomous terms contain each other and depend on
each other for their meaning.
In this essay, we read Ferenczi's texts as constituting a method-
ological approach that in many striking respects foreshadowed
Derrida's deconstmctionism. We might say that it was the passion of
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Ferenczi's life work to deconstruct difference, particularly difference

between analyst and patient, healthy and sick, male and female, and
the difference that we will focus on in this paper, the difference
between words and deeds.
Throughout his career, but most fully in the 1920s and early 1930s,
Sandor Ferenczi elaborated a vision of psychoanalysis that featured a
more egalitarian and coparticipatory approach, and highlighted the
ubiquitous role of language in the psychoanalytic situation. Ferenczi's
clinical approach subtly undermined and deconstructed many of the
differences that were presumed to be fundamental in psychoanalysis.
In theory and in practice he unsettles the polarities of doctor-patient,
analyst-analysand (analysand being a term that he had coined),
reason-emotion, mother-father, male-female, transference-
countertransference, and health-illness.
The deconstructionist, in analyzing texts, identifies problematic
biases and decenters them, centering instead on marginalized
perspectives. This is precisely what Ferenczi did in questioning his
own presuppositions and biases as the analyst and in placing the
patient's perspective in the center. He gave prominence to what had
been until then a suppressed voice, the patient's perceptions of the
analyst as a person. Prior to Ferenczi, much of the patient's percep-
tions could be dismissed as transferential distortion. In reversing the
polarities, through his experiments in mutual analysis, Ferenczi placed
the patient's perceptions of the analyst into the center of the
exploratory field and allowed his own perspective to be decentered,
thus interrupting the hegemony of the dominant social order. Is it
because this approach risked destabalizing the established order and
particularly the authoritarian medical hierarchy that Ferenczi's work
was so long suppressed?
Ferenczi subtly attacked another great polarity, the distinction
between words and deeds. Ferenczi recognized that the patient was
always communicating, both verbally and nonverbally, and he also
 526 ADREENNE HARRIS AND LEWIS ARON

saw that communication was itself a form of action. It was not until
considerably later in the century that this approach was clarified
philosophically. Wittgenstein (1953), in his Philosophical Investiga-
tions, argued that language is best conceived of as an activity involv-
ing the use of words as tools. Words are not labels for things, but gain
their meaning through their use in social interchange, language games.
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Words are actions. If words are acts and if acts are communications,
then psychoanalysis can no longer be thought of as only a talking
cure. The talking cure becomes a cure through action, interaction, and
enactment, in which what is talked about is enacted and what is
enacted must be talked about. Levenson (1972) was among the first
analysts following Ferenczi, but now with the benefit of semeiotics,
structuralism, and poststructuralism, to state this more precisely,
"Transference must involve the reenactment, between patient and
therapist, of what is talked about. It is what is done about what is said"
(Levenson, 1987, p. 210, emphasis in original). Levenson (1982) clari-
fies that "Psychoanalysis originally postulated a serious antinomy
between word and deed. It was the 'talking cure,' and what was acted
upon could not be spoken about—that is, could not be analyzed" (p.
100). In contrast, contemporary philosophy, follows Wittgenstein's
remark that "Words are also deeds." Ferenczi could not have articu-
lated this in these terms, but his clinical thinking anticipated much of
it. The talking therapy is an "active" and interactive technique!
An early articulation of this perspective is developed in Ferenczi's
(1911) paper "On Obscene Words." In this paper he suggests the
transformational power in the clinical situation of the particular affect-
laden local term for the body or for sexual experience or feeling rather
than the more abstracted medical or scientific terminology. Regarding
obscene words, he writes "if one does not shrink from—and indeed,
insists on—getting the patient to express the very wording of these
thoughts (and, if necessary, to utter it oneself), it often results in unex-
pected disclosures and a gratifying progress" (1911, p. 135). In those
early years as a psychoanalyst, Ferenczi was freshly fascinated with
Freud's work. Here, as he does throughout most of his career, Ferenczi
links his ideas to those of his mentor though actually often extending
in a quite different direction. Think of Freud's own perhaps urbane,
perhaps emotionally remote, commentary in the paper on the Dora
case in which he argues for the calm illumination of sexual material
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY 527

through modulated scientific terms. "The best way of speaking about

such things is to be dry and direct I call bodily organs and
processes by their technical names, and I tell these to the patient if
they—the names, I mean—happen to be unknown to her. J'appelle un
chat un chat" (Freud, 1905, p. 48). Jane Gallop (1985) cleverly
remarked in regard to this passage, that
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At the very moment he defines non-prurient language as direct

and non-euphemistic, he takes a French detour into a figurative
expression. By his terms, this French sentence would seem to be
titillating, coy, flirtatious. And to make matters more juicy (less
"dry"), chat or chatte can be used as vulgar (vulvar) slang for the
female genitalia. So in this gynecological context, where he
founds his innocence upon the direct use of technical terms, he
takes a French detour and calls a pussy a pussy [p. 209].

In striking contrast to Freud's dry medical terminology, Ferenczi

argues that there is a time and place in the clinical situation for talk
which connects to the most inflamed and lively feelings, in which the
graphic term excavates feelings of shame, fantasies, and psychic
mechanisms that move and shape the treatments.
Ferenczi then proceeds to argue for a theory of representation much
akin to the semiotics of Kristeva. "It may be added that the capacity of
representing wishes by means of speech signs, so poor in quality, is
not acquired all at once" (Ferenczi, 1911, p. 139). His view of the
regressive features of language is like Kristeva's view of "the semi-
otic" in which the material qualities, the prosody and rhythm, the
sensuous materiality of signs, and above all the maternal remain
powerfully imbricated in all language no matter how abstracted its
meaning systems become. Ferenczi looks at the way speech carries
image, action, and primary process, ties to the maternal body, and thus
is always a multifaceted set of representations, such that words would
be coded as meaning, as sound pattern, as image and as body move-
ment and motor action. This perspective dispels any simple notion of
symbolic representation. He also treats speaking as a form of action so
that speaking some charged set of words—such as obscene words—
promotes regression both in the hearer and in the speaker.
 528 ADRffiNNE HARRIS AND LEWIS ARON

These ideas about speech and the complex and multimodal forms
contained in mental representation draw on an implicit theory of
memory in several ways. Ferenczi suggests that there is a regressive
and encapsulated power in obscene words because both the sounds
and mode of production are dominated by primary process. The
particular graphic term will carry the feelings and experiences of the
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patient/speaker much more powerfully because the affects and

fantasies associated with these words remain remote from more
abstract meaning systems. What this suggests is a model for memory
and representation in which distinct sensory storage systems are
sometimes interactive and sometimes independent, depending on the
psychic consequences. Words will be stored by criteria involving
meaning, use, action, and acoustic or sensory properties. Ferenczi has
understood that much more than the associative structure of language
is entailed in symbolization and mental transformations. The abstract
meanings and semantic associations of a word are simply the tips of
the iceberg and the power of speaking; the power of the sensory
register upon patient and analyst, is likely to be profound. Speaking
becomes a form of action and, in some instances, an assault.
In his 1931 paper Ferenczi links strategies in dialogue and speech
to the dissociated self state structure in certain disturbed patients. He
advocates speaking in a fresh and authentic and playful way to the
child self within the adult patient. We might imagine these child self
states as aspects of psychic functioning in many persons with varying
degrees of disturbance. It is interesting that Ferenczi both noted and
encouraged regression and thus may have been comfortable and
prepared for the shifting speech systems that this sort of work with
regressed patients entailed. Contemporary interests in dissociation and
fragmented part selves and self states would have been recognizable
to Ferenczi.
Contemporary psycholinguistic work on parent-child dialogue
would bear out Ferenczi's intuitive sense that the analyst must
connect with and enter the specialized speech and language worlds of
the patient that may be very age-specific. Indeed, Ferenczi understood
that each patient is multi-voiced. From extensive observation,
psycholinguists now see that parents tailor their speech to the
imagined capacities of the child (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). These
speech forms have been called either "motherese" or "the baby regis-
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY 529

ter" and analyzed by linguists who describe the tonal, prosodic,

semantic, and pragmatic shifts that parents (and even older children)
adopt in speaking to small children. This has usually been seen as an
intuitive, unlearned practice of parents speaking to children, a later
evolved linguistic form, perhaps, of the phase of patterned attunement
in earlier infancy.
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In current analytic theory we would understand this intuitive shift in

speaking style as an aspect of intersubjectivity where the quality and
shape of the dialogue is mutually determined and where the speech of
analysts is shaped by their conceptions of the status or identity of their
listener. This perspective suggests the multiple shifting identities in
analytic speaking and listening, the multi-voicedness of the dialogue,
a completely postmodern project. Ferenczi's dictum to speak to the
child in the adult patient then seems based on his intuitive under-
standing that, if analysts attune sensitively to the multiple states in
their patient, they will process the patient's psychic state and whether
it reflects the child's experience. These perceptions would then almost
inevitably lead analysts to make a dialect or speech register shift in
order to respond to the person they experience in the room. These
shifts create a dramatic enactment or reenactment.
Ferenczi, in his implicit theory of language, paid particular atten-
tion to the pragmatic, as well as to the semantic, level of meaning. The
pragmatics of language refer to contextually situated meanings, and in
attending to pragmatics, Ferenczi recognized the metacommunicative
aspects of language. Consider Ferenczi's deconstruction of the
dichotomous categories, remembering and repeating. In classical
terms these two processes exclude each other. Repetition was thought
to be an alternative to memory and was seen as a resistance to recov-
ering memories. Recovering memories was thought to put an end to
the need to act. Remembering was privileged and valued and repeti-
tion was devalued. Ferenczi found instances that did not fit into either
category, and he used these instances to deconstruct the very differ-
ence between memory and repetition.
It was precisely because Ferenczi began to break down the sharp
distinction between words and acts that he could recognize the
importance and therapeutic value of enactment. He was among the
first analysts to view acting out as having a positive communicative
value in psychoanalysis, rather than disparaging action as opposed to,
 530 ADRENNE HARRIS AND LEWIS ARON

and as a resistance against, the recovery of memories. He did not only

see that sometimes repetition and reenactment had to precede remem-
bering, but he recognized that repetition is a form of memory, a
particularly affectively vital form of memory. Enactment is a form of
remembering for both patient and analyst, and similarly, the remem-
bering of some event in an analysis may be a form of action upon the
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self or upon the other.

The recognition that words are acts begins early in Ferenczi's
career when he wrote about tics as disguised expressions of obscene
words and coprophilic insults. Later he extended this observation from
tics to stammering. Stammering became a disguised expression of
obscene words, a sadistic assault. Ferenczi (1925) found that, in quite
a number of cases of impotence and frigidity, cure could be achieved
only after the patient had overcome the prohibition against saying
obscene words during the sex act (p. 227).
So we can retrace Ferenczi's steps as he discovers this symbiotic
relationship of words and acts. Verbal tics and stuttering are an inter-
mediate step between words and acts. In his discussion of obscene
words, once again, he provides an example of a phenomena that does
not neatly fit into the word/act distinction; when you curse at some-
one, is that an action or a communication? The action/communication
polarity breaks down. Later, Ferenczi discusses how his words are
flung at a patient's face and how words can kill. Gradually, one step at
a time, Ferenczi destroys the very distinction between communication
and action upon which most of classical analytic technique and theory
depends.
In another clinical illustration, a patient of Ferenczi's thought of the
words to a song while she was associating. Later she acknowledges
that she thought too of the melody. Ferenczi does not delay in asking
her and indeed in persuading her, against much embarrassment and
resistance, to sing the song. Is singing a song a communication of
words or an act? Later, she recalls that her sister would make certain
gestures while singing, and Ferenczi gets her to perform the song with
a full expression of these gestures. Words, melody, gestures, perfor-
mance: At what point can verbal association be said to change into
performance and enactment? For Ferenczi, these distinctions begin to
become less relevant. Later, at Ferenczi's insistence, "She conducted
in front of me (while at the same time she imitated the sounds of an
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY 531

orchestra) a long phrase from a symphony" (1920, p. 204) and played

a difficult piano piece that she was anxious about performing.
By 1931, Ferenczi offers the following clinical guidance:

Not infrequently, patients, often in the middle of their free asso-

ciations, produce little stories which they have made up, or even
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poems and rhymes, and sometimes they ask for a pencil so as to

make us a present of a drawing, generally of a very naive sort.
Naturally I let them indulge in this and make the little gifts a
starting-point for further fantasy-formation, which I afterwards
analyze. Does not this by itself sound as it came from the analy-
sis of children [p. 133]?

The importance of this is not only that Ferenczi was among the first
to experiment with a modern version of art, music, and movement
therapy, but that whether it was tics, obscene words, gestural expres-
sion, insults, song, dance, poetry, storytelling, or complicated interper-
sonal enactments and interchanges, Ferenczi consistently challenged
the sharp distinction between word and deed, recollection and repeti-
tion. If this was true for the patient's words and deeds, associations
and transference behaviors, than it was similarly true for the analyst's
words and deeds, interpretations, and countertransference enactments.
At what point does a verbal interpretation by the analyst become a
behavioral enactment? If the analyst hurls the interpretation at the
patient like a rock, is that word or deed? And once this distinction
breaks down, then has the talking cure not become a more interac-
tional, experientially alive, active technique?
In a highly dramatic moment of the Clinical Diary (and it should be
said that the diary has numerous dramatic moments), Ferenczi (1932)
realizes that he has hurt a patient more than necessary, more than he
had known. In the act of interpreting, he had cruelly flung words into
his patient's face. He understands that his words could have
murdered! Ferenczi comes to the realization that, "it is an unavoidable
task for the analyst: although he may behave as he will, he may take
kindness and relaxation as far as he possibly can, the time will come
when he will have to repeat with his own hands the act of murder
previously perpetrated against the patient. In contrast to the original
murder, however, he is not allowed to deny his guilt" (1932, p. 52). It
 532 ADRIENNE HARRIS AND LEWIS ARON

is not an accident that Ferenczi describes words in such concrete

terms as having the power of actions, words as acts; throughout his
work, acts are viewed as language and language as action. In this
passage, we read Ferenczi as he discovers the inevitability of reen-
actment, in the psychoanalytic space, of the patient's most powerful
trauma, "This hangman's work is inevitable" (p. 53). Moreover,
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Ferenczi realizes that the enactment reenacts both the patient's life
history as well as his own. "This gave me an opportunity to penetrate
much deeper into my own infantilism: the tragic moment in childhood
when my mother declares: You are my murderer" (p. 53). Ferenczi
comes to see the analytic engagement as an inevitable, mutual partici-
pation and recreation of the childhood histories and particularly of the
pathogenic traumas, of both the patient and the analyst. In his investi-
gations of mutuality he deconstructed the polarized dichotomies of
word/deed, association/interpretation, transference/ countertransfer-
ence, and patient/analyst.
No consideration of Ferenczi's theoretical preoccupations can be
divorced from questions of clinical practice and process. Ferenczi's
ideas were always worked out in living dyadic experience. In consid-
ering then the clinical implications of Ferenczi's semiotics, we might
start with the impact of these ideas on analytic listening. Shifts in
speech register; a move to a different language world could be heard
both as naturally occurring phenomena in discourse and as signals or
markers of intrapsychic shifts or as signals of alterations in aspects of
the transference and countertransference interaction. An analyst
attuning carefully to the psychic state or self state of a patient can
learn to notice and wonder about changes in speech register and can
react with an accommodating speech register shift. Both the speech of
the individual and the mutually constructed dialogue will be and can
be highly sensitive barometers of both relational shifts and intrapsy-
chic alterations.
There is an inevitable linkage between these ideas drawn from
semiotic theory and language theory and contemporary clinical prob-
lems of considering multiplicity in individual character. Multiple
selves, multiple voices or codes, or registers are less thought to be the
exclusive feature of highly disturbed and massively dissociated char-
acter types. We come to recognize the multiplicity that paradoxically
coexists with the very identity of character.
 FERENCZI'S SEMIOTIC THEORY 533

Imagining clinical process this way transforms many discursive

experiences and dialogues into enactments. To connect to Ferenczi's
elaboration of the interplay of word and action, much of what has been
seen as speaking, as opposed to acting, must be reconfigured. Deeply
felt short-term or extended streams of dyadic experience can be seen
as performances, dramas that powerfully replay scenes and themes in
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the patient's experience. Ferenczi's challenging of the distinction

between speech and action raises fundamental questions for psycho-
analytic technique, which has always been based on conveying to the
patient the fundamental rule that requires them to "say everything"
along with the implicit message "and do not act" or "act out." The
patient's associations and the analyst's interpretations are always
simultaneously both language and action. The paradox for the analyst,
as Ferenczi's successes and failures attest, is to be drawn into action
and to be vigilant and reflective in respect to enactment.

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