My Words Would Have Murdered: Sandor Ferenczi, Women’s Memoir, and Reparative Reading

In perhaps his most well-known skeptical stance, Freud, unable to cope with the sheer number of his female patients who had been victims of childhood sexual assault, ultimately abandoned his seduction theory, positing instead that his patients' hysteria had its roots in fantasy. Ferenczi's awareness of the cultural origins of such complexes is hugely significant- unlike "heredity," societal patterns such as the wide-scale abuse of children and the rape of women have the potential to be transformed through action that springs from an awareness of these (often hidden) stories . Since this shock, this disillusionment, there is much less talk of trauma, the constitution now begins to play the principal role. The work of Ferenczi evidences a powerful attempt to move beyond that space of doubt and into the reality of another's pain. Since "the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness" (Herman 1997, 1), the work of writing (as well as reading) trauma is both difficult and necessary.