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Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality
In Thalassa,Ferenczi expands the symbols of pallus and vagina into cosmic symbols, not by reference to myths but by his interpretations of embryonic, physiological, and psychological facts. he develops the view that the whole of life is determined by a tendency toreturn to the womb, equating the process of birth with the phylogenetic transition of animal life from water to land, and linking coitus to the idea of "thalassal regression": "the longing for the sea-life from which man emerged in primeval times."
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 19, 2025
Batshit, redundant, a tad repetitive, but never dull, Sandor Ferenczi's Thalassa is an absolute rollercoaster of a ride which biologises and radicalises the already radical grief-ridden Freud we find in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (some have even gone so far as to say that Ferenczi set out to parody/satirise Freud with this text, but I don't quite buy that, it's much too sincere and shares the same joy Freud had in spurning reticence and jumping straight into the deep end).
Geotrauma, the vital irritability in the inorganic, the Ice Age, the development of sex and its aggressive rapacity over the female to create warm internalised intrauterine spaces, the phylogenetic externalisation of our gonads - all of these phenomena remain as traces which reside in the biological unconscious of our organs, which in themselves bear a tripartite orientation toward utility, autoerotic pleasure and a wish to return to the inanimate/foetal (sound familiar?).
We all want to be mudskippers or frogs, and the repose we take in sex, sleep and death allows for a hallucinatory imitation of the regressive stages of development our species has already went through millions of years prior to our birth. Ever wondered why a vagina has a fishy smell? Take a wild guess. (That question is a genuine footnote put in there by Ferenczi, and with wild theorising like that why the fuck wouldn't you want to at least give this a skim?)
Geotrauma, the vital irritability in the inorganic, the Ice Age, the development of sex and its aggressive rapacity over the female to create warm internalised intrauterine spaces, the phylogenetic externalisation of our gonads - all of these phenomena remain as traces which reside in the biological unconscious of our organs, which in themselves bear a tripartite orientation toward utility, autoerotic pleasure and a wish to return to the inanimate/foetal (sound familiar?).
We all want to be mudskippers or frogs, and the repose we take in sex, sleep and death allows for a hallucinatory imitation of the regressive stages of development our species has already went through millions of years prior to our birth. Ever wondered why a vagina has a fishy smell? Take a wild guess. (That question is a genuine footnote put in there by Ferenczi, and with wild theorising like that why the fuck wouldn't you want to at least give this a skim?)
January 1, 2020
In Thalassa: a Theory of Genitalia (1924) Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi connects ontogeny with phylogeny: individual development, a la Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), with evolutionary history. The book reads like a collection of essays or lectures with the somewhat misleading title Thalassa. Thalassa was a mythological spirit of the sea from whom fish come from, so from the title I was expecting only an explication of the parallel between our ancestral lineage from the ocean with our life in the womb. The original title in Hungarian is actually "Catastrophes in the Development of the Genital Function: A Psychoanalytic Study." I learned of this work from Stephen Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) where he devotes a chapter tracing the influence of Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory to psychoanalytic thought. Instead the book really is mostly a theory of genitalia. Thalassa and the mythology around her isn't discussed at all, so Ferenczi assumes you know all that. The parallel itself is discussed in full in the chapter The Phylogenetic Parallel and in the final chapter. The rest of the book speculates on genital development, as linked to the anus (like it is with the cloaca of birds and reptiles) and coitus itself as a symbolic return to conditions of the womb.
Ferenczi uses an evolutionary theory built on Lamarckian inheritance, non-genetic acquired characteristics, and Haeckel's recapitulation, the development of the embryo parallels the development of evolutionary ancestry. Ferenczi explicitly rejects a Darwinian mechanism of natural selection to argue for the development of placenta. The placenta in which mammal embryos live in he argues is a remnant of the aquatic ancestry of all land mammals who had to develop new ways to develop offspring rather than soft eggs in the water. Reptiles and later birds evolved hard eggs, and mammals evolved live birth where development occurs inside the mother. Life in the egg or the womb which the embryo lives in is like the ocean, surrounded by life sustaining fluids. The disappearance of oceans and appearance of land are akin to the trauma of birth where animals at the end of the Devonian period had to develop new ways to breathe for themselves, much as babies do after birth. A greater dependence on the mother is the solution mammals came up with, receiving vital fluids from the mother and forming a closer emotional bond.
"For, we reflected, what if the entire interuterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized that aboriginal piscine period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?"
Ferenczi goes further than even Haeckel who didn't think recapitulation applied to the development of placenta, as how would natural selection work on this? It is Lamarckian inheritance, which Ferenczi thinks is closer to psychoanalysis than Darwinian selection, which recapitulated our oceanic past. Some aqueous organisms found their way onto land first via pools of water and developed their own breathing and body support capacities which would mean enlarging the period of gamete development in the mother to develop these changes in safety, pushing back development of gills. The activity of the amphibians on land developed these changes, both for themselves and greater investment for offspring to have these changes, providing the fluids. But because the desire to return to the simpler oceanic life doesn't go away, these regressive instincts maintain a desire to return to the womb which simulates the feeling of being in the ocean our ancestors had. This is "Thalassal regression", an expression ultimately of the death instinct to return to a simpler existence more homogenous with the environment. The act of coitus is an attempt to return to this primordial unity, the exchange of fluids and the physical intimacy involved. Sexuality has an aggressive element, especially by the male. It is interesting to point out though I don't think Ferenczi does, that the fishy smell of the vagina is due to the chemical compound trimethaylamine, which is also found in rotting dead fish. Interesting parallel.
Sigmund Freud wrote of the "oceanic feeling" at the root of religious experience in his Civilization and its Discontents (1929) in which individuals feel an interconnectedness with the world which over powers their individual existence, fueled by remnants of infantile narcissism when one didn't have to care for oneself and was more a part of the mother. The ocean is a common example for the aesthetic feeling of the sublime, of awe and powerlessness in the presence of greatness. The ocean is deeper and stretches further than our minds can contemplate. Ferenczi provides a literal origin for this feeling as some primordial anamnesis of evolutionary ancestry.
Pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras and his followers identified the intersection of two circles, which forms a vesica piscis "fish bladder", as the origin of separateness, of duality. The vesica piscis is the passage of birth, literally a vagina, a symbol of fertility. This is the dyad of mother and child, separated from the original unity. And maybe the separation of our land animal ancestors from the ocean, the mother of life...
This all sounds crazy. The placenta most likely didn't evolve this way, and Lamackian inheritance is largely discredited and Haeckel's recapitulation doesn't apply everywhere. Still the ancestors of vertebrates did come from the ocean and life did emerge in the water, and the relationship between mammals and mother is very intimate and all encompassing. For the naturalist all things follow the same physical laws, so there are parallels to notice between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The symbolism of the explanation is pretty interesting, as the only currency of psychoanalysis is fantasy. We begin to understand the world by myth, even naturalism involved myth making. We don't really know what happened back then.
The background to all of this was the notion of a birth trauma occurring before the Oedipal complex which is chiefly responsible for both neurosis and culture. This was thought up by Otto Rank, an early member of Freud's circle along with Ferenczi who infuriated Freud with his The Trauma of Birth 1924 and soon after left his circle and went on his own. Ferenczi who was a close friend of Rank's began to distance himself and quiet his own support for the pre-Oedipal trauma as the decisive cultural influence. The birth trauma in Thalassa is rooted in phylogeny, something Freud seemed to approve of. Freud described the book as "the boldest application of psycho-analysis that was ever attempted" and supported Ferenczi's publication.
Ferenczi goes much further than the womb in the whole book, giving catastrophic moments in natural history which correspond to earlier biological development, though doesn't explicate all of them.
Origin of organic life- maturation of sex cells
Origin of unicellular organisms- birth of mature gametes
Beginning of sexual propagation- fertilization
Development of marine life- development of embryo in uterus
Recession of ocean; adaptation to land- birth
Development of external sexual organs-primacy of genitals, genital stage
Ice Age- latency period
This is a lot to take in, which is why I'm reading through the book Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1977), which also mentions Ferenczi, to understand how the bits and pieces of these evolutionary parallels developed. I hope that sociobiologists can come up with a sweeping evolutionary epic of this scale using current evolutionary theory freed of excessive use of Lamarck and Haeckel. Gould in the passage mentioning Thalassa didn't critique the theory itself but just presented its absurdity. But this is no more absurd or unfalsifiable than other myths, it's just that this uses naturalist and evolutionary mechanisms. So let this be an inspiration to make a better story if possible.
Ferenczi uses an evolutionary theory built on Lamarckian inheritance, non-genetic acquired characteristics, and Haeckel's recapitulation, the development of the embryo parallels the development of evolutionary ancestry. Ferenczi explicitly rejects a Darwinian mechanism of natural selection to argue for the development of placenta. The placenta in which mammal embryos live in he argues is a remnant of the aquatic ancestry of all land mammals who had to develop new ways to develop offspring rather than soft eggs in the water. Reptiles and later birds evolved hard eggs, and mammals evolved live birth where development occurs inside the mother. Life in the egg or the womb which the embryo lives in is like the ocean, surrounded by life sustaining fluids. The disappearance of oceans and appearance of land are akin to the trauma of birth where animals at the end of the Devonian period had to develop new ways to breathe for themselves, much as babies do after birth. A greater dependence on the mother is the solution mammals came up with, receiving vital fluids from the mother and forming a closer emotional bond.
"For, we reflected, what if the entire interuterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized that aboriginal piscine period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?"
Ferenczi goes further than even Haeckel who didn't think recapitulation applied to the development of placenta, as how would natural selection work on this? It is Lamarckian inheritance, which Ferenczi thinks is closer to psychoanalysis than Darwinian selection, which recapitulated our oceanic past. Some aqueous organisms found their way onto land first via pools of water and developed their own breathing and body support capacities which would mean enlarging the period of gamete development in the mother to develop these changes in safety, pushing back development of gills. The activity of the amphibians on land developed these changes, both for themselves and greater investment for offspring to have these changes, providing the fluids. But because the desire to return to the simpler oceanic life doesn't go away, these regressive instincts maintain a desire to return to the womb which simulates the feeling of being in the ocean our ancestors had. This is "Thalassal regression", an expression ultimately of the death instinct to return to a simpler existence more homogenous with the environment. The act of coitus is an attempt to return to this primordial unity, the exchange of fluids and the physical intimacy involved. Sexuality has an aggressive element, especially by the male. It is interesting to point out though I don't think Ferenczi does, that the fishy smell of the vagina is due to the chemical compound trimethaylamine, which is also found in rotting dead fish. Interesting parallel.
Sigmund Freud wrote of the "oceanic feeling" at the root of religious experience in his Civilization and its Discontents (1929) in which individuals feel an interconnectedness with the world which over powers their individual existence, fueled by remnants of infantile narcissism when one didn't have to care for oneself and was more a part of the mother. The ocean is a common example for the aesthetic feeling of the sublime, of awe and powerlessness in the presence of greatness. The ocean is deeper and stretches further than our minds can contemplate. Ferenczi provides a literal origin for this feeling as some primordial anamnesis of evolutionary ancestry.
Pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras and his followers identified the intersection of two circles, which forms a vesica piscis "fish bladder", as the origin of separateness, of duality. The vesica piscis is the passage of birth, literally a vagina, a symbol of fertility. This is the dyad of mother and child, separated from the original unity. And maybe the separation of our land animal ancestors from the ocean, the mother of life...
This all sounds crazy. The placenta most likely didn't evolve this way, and Lamackian inheritance is largely discredited and Haeckel's recapitulation doesn't apply everywhere. Still the ancestors of vertebrates did come from the ocean and life did emerge in the water, and the relationship between mammals and mother is very intimate and all encompassing. For the naturalist all things follow the same physical laws, so there are parallels to notice between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The symbolism of the explanation is pretty interesting, as the only currency of psychoanalysis is fantasy. We begin to understand the world by myth, even naturalism involved myth making. We don't really know what happened back then.
The background to all of this was the notion of a birth trauma occurring before the Oedipal complex which is chiefly responsible for both neurosis and culture. This was thought up by Otto Rank, an early member of Freud's circle along with Ferenczi who infuriated Freud with his The Trauma of Birth 1924 and soon after left his circle and went on his own. Ferenczi who was a close friend of Rank's began to distance himself and quiet his own support for the pre-Oedipal trauma as the decisive cultural influence. The birth trauma in Thalassa is rooted in phylogeny, something Freud seemed to approve of. Freud described the book as "the boldest application of psycho-analysis that was ever attempted" and supported Ferenczi's publication.
Ferenczi goes much further than the womb in the whole book, giving catastrophic moments in natural history which correspond to earlier biological development, though doesn't explicate all of them.
Origin of organic life- maturation of sex cells
Origin of unicellular organisms- birth of mature gametes
Beginning of sexual propagation- fertilization
Development of marine life- development of embryo in uterus
Recession of ocean; adaptation to land- birth
Development of external sexual organs-primacy of genitals, genital stage
Ice Age- latency period
This is a lot to take in, which is why I'm reading through the book Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1977), which also mentions Ferenczi, to understand how the bits and pieces of these evolutionary parallels developed. I hope that sociobiologists can come up with a sweeping evolutionary epic of this scale using current evolutionary theory freed of excessive use of Lamarck and Haeckel. Gould in the passage mentioning Thalassa didn't critique the theory itself but just presented its absurdity. But this is no more absurd or unfalsifiable than other myths, it's just that this uses naturalist and evolutionary mechanisms. So let this be an inspiration to make a better story if possible.
March 7, 2025
At the end of chapter 8 of this book, Ferenczi asks: "Did not Goethe, indeed, say that a bad theory was better than none at all?" (p. 72).
To answer him, I must admit that I have no idea, as, according to my offhand search, that quote is untraceable and there is of course no proper citation in the text itself. Nevertheless, I find this line a fitting synecdoche for the work of this beautiful stupid hilarious book. It must again be said that WWI was probably the best thing to ever happen to psychoanalysis.
Thalassa, essentially, works as an extension of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (which I will ardently defend as the best thing ever written ever), its main point being that sexuality is the partial, symbolic fulfillment of not just returning to the womb, but also... to the ocean! This is a point that stunningly comes without the obvious conclusion that Eros and the death drive are the same thing (duh!). Maybe Ferenczi was still afraid of saying that to Freud at this time. But essentially the idea is that being that the mystery of "genitality" can be solved by understanding our development as an ontogenic recapitulation of phylogeny—this idea, of course, is nothing new, and features prominently in Freud's metapsychology. What Ferenczi adds here is that the death drive (really just The Drive but I digress...) manifests as a regression down this evolutionary chain, with all wish-fulfilling faculties of the psyche aiming toward the eventual return to being a fish in the ocean as a last step before primordial nothingness or whatever.
I really really enjoyed reading this because I think that it reads like a poetics of sexuality. As with Freud, I really also do not care about thinking about its scientific validity. The ideas presented in this book are still really romantic and I think probably in some ways a legitimate next step from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I also really like a text where ridiculous claims are allowed to breathe and eventually ossify as romantic "fairy tale" explanations of things. Also mythology is real.
That being said, such a radical poetry does not come with some real freaky failed assertions. Like... the entire opening of the text is based on connecting impotence with anal / urethral erotisms. I love Freud but I don't care about the Three Essays like that. It is thus a really jarring movement when he quickly moves from the piss and shit part of this book towards the innate desire to be a fish part. Also a lot of his claims are based on some originary catastrophe where all of the oceans dried up and animals were forced to move to land. He cites the raising of Mount Ararat at the end of the flood (of Noah). I'm not a scientist—and yes there was at one point more water—but I'm not sure that this one holds. I've also seen people really dislike this or engage with this (negatively) because of its super essentialist and probably just like sexist understanding of masculinity / femininity. To that I have to say like yeah obviously he's wrong. We're still fine with the Oedipus Complex even though like... that's still soooo dubious for girls. Also maybe there is great poetry to be found in a gender binary (I'm joking...).
In conclusion: this is crazy and silly and zany and fun. I don't care if it's right. Obviously it's horrible philosophy if you try to read it as that. And it's definitely worse as hard science. But the lurching toward "Bioanalysis" (the psychoanalysis [really moreso the literary analysis] of biological phenomena) is like... a really giant and profound thing and I know that this was written wholeheartedly positioned toward the pursuit of absolute Truth.
In the words of the poet via the words of the other poet:
What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping... The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.
To answer him, I must admit that I have no idea, as, according to my offhand search, that quote is untraceable and there is of course no proper citation in the text itself. Nevertheless, I find this line a fitting synecdoche for the work of this beautiful stupid hilarious book. It must again be said that WWI was probably the best thing to ever happen to psychoanalysis.
Thalassa, essentially, works as an extension of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (which I will ardently defend as the best thing ever written ever), its main point being that sexuality is the partial, symbolic fulfillment of not just returning to the womb, but also... to the ocean! This is a point that stunningly comes without the obvious conclusion that Eros and the death drive are the same thing (duh!). Maybe Ferenczi was still afraid of saying that to Freud at this time. But essentially the idea is that being that the mystery of "genitality" can be solved by understanding our development as an ontogenic recapitulation of phylogeny—this idea, of course, is nothing new, and features prominently in Freud's metapsychology. What Ferenczi adds here is that the death drive (really just The Drive but I digress...) manifests as a regression down this evolutionary chain, with all wish-fulfilling faculties of the psyche aiming toward the eventual return to being a fish in the ocean as a last step before primordial nothingness or whatever.
I really really enjoyed reading this because I think that it reads like a poetics of sexuality. As with Freud, I really also do not care about thinking about its scientific validity. The ideas presented in this book are still really romantic and I think probably in some ways a legitimate next step from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I also really like a text where ridiculous claims are allowed to breathe and eventually ossify as romantic "fairy tale" explanations of things. Also mythology is real.
That being said, such a radical poetry does not come with some real freaky failed assertions. Like... the entire opening of the text is based on connecting impotence with anal / urethral erotisms. I love Freud but I don't care about the Three Essays like that. It is thus a really jarring movement when he quickly moves from the piss and shit part of this book towards the innate desire to be a fish part. Also a lot of his claims are based on some originary catastrophe where all of the oceans dried up and animals were forced to move to land. He cites the raising of Mount Ararat at the end of the flood (of Noah). I'm not a scientist—and yes there was at one point more water—but I'm not sure that this one holds. I've also seen people really dislike this or engage with this (negatively) because of its super essentialist and probably just like sexist understanding of masculinity / femininity. To that I have to say like yeah obviously he's wrong. We're still fine with the Oedipus Complex even though like... that's still soooo dubious for girls. Also maybe there is great poetry to be found in a gender binary (I'm joking...).
In conclusion: this is crazy and silly and zany and fun. I don't care if it's right. Obviously it's horrible philosophy if you try to read it as that. And it's definitely worse as hard science. But the lurching toward "Bioanalysis" (the psychoanalysis [really moreso the literary analysis] of biological phenomena) is like... a really giant and profound thing and I know that this was written wholeheartedly positioned toward the pursuit of absolute Truth.
In the words of the poet via the words of the other poet:
What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping... The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.
May 20, 2022
Ferenczi admits that his use of analogies in the book has heuristic value. As a result, this book is best read as a kind of entertaining science fiction. The examples in service to his recapitulation theory are well drawn and the interpretations are often witty.(1) The emphasis on genitality, while in many respects interesting, regresses to a pre-Freudian conception of full enjoyment. One wonders how the book would read if it were instead titled Thalassa: A Theory of Polymorphous Perversion.
(1) See S.J. Gould's "Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy" in I Have Landed for an acerbic response to Freud's idea of recapitulaton & K. Peden's 'Alkaline Recapitulation: Haeckel's Hypothesis and the Afterlife of a Concept' (https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/alka...) for a careful conceptual history of recapitulation in the context of Romantic philosophies of nature. Peden compares Haeckel's work to an alkali, in contrast to Darwin's acidic corrosion:
"On the one hand, the notion of universal acid seems to connote a destruction or corrosion of form. On the other hand, however, the metaphor of the algorithm functions precisely as the bestowal of determinate form. This same duality is also present, as we have already seen, in Haeckel’s Romantic genealogy, in the contrasting influences of Goethe and Schelling... the essence of Haeckel’s biogenetic law is the eternally repeated return to the primordial absence of form, protoplasmic Urschleim, as a regenerative corrective to the relentless linearity of natural selection."
Peden helpfully traces the effects of Haeckel's oceanic recapitulation on contemporary theory:
"The schism between Darwin’s and Haeckel’s concepts is legible in the simple fact that The Origin of Species effectively undid the concept of species as such, affirming its transient, if not purely nominalist, quality, whereas Haeckel’s entire effort was geared toward discerning the figures of fixed species in the spatial representation of a temporal ontogenesis. For Haeckel, tracking this genesis was a source of inspiration, affirming a closeness to oceanic nature that in many instances appears to be a striking precursor to Freud’s death drive. Here, origin is indeed the goal. And it is this conceptual figure, rendered so explicit in the Haeckelian contribution to Darwinism, that we also find in contemporary theory and its antecedents in twentieth-century European thought. Phenomenology moves from a return to the lifeworld to returns to myriad other primordial instances: thrownness, the flesh of the world, auto-affective life. In each case thought tends toward a recapitulative access to the primordial instance in order to redeem its practices in the present. But self-professed antiphenomenologists are liable to the same charge. For Deleuze, the goal of thought is to restore its vocation in the “univocity of being,” finding restoration in a “single and same Ocean for all the drops.” For Badiou, confrontation with the primordial void is the condition for any authentically subjective accomplishment. In the end, however, it is hard to tell what the conceptual difference is between a total metaphysical excision of historical time and its maximal recapitulation in the fleeting instance of the originary void’s presence in what Badiou terms the Event. As for Slavoj Žižek, the same point about the void holds, but here *the Haeckelian specter arguably looms larger than Žižek’s own professed Hegelianism* [emphasis added]. His own intellectual itinerary—from Kant to Schelling to Hegel—might be aptly, if crassly, distilled in a simple formula: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates cosmogony."
***
Take two. This text is often annoying, but I'm increasingly convinced by its core claim - all of our desires, at their root, are a desire to return to our 'beautiful wet wife'. On reflection, the biological examples (the frog one is particularly memorable) aren't odious, just insistent. It's understandable why SF constantly brings up the desire for slime; this was a radical departure from the familialism of mainstream psychoanalysis that, amazingly enough, never dissolves into a collective unconscious. The ocean for SF is trans-individual: a space of relations that isn't itself an individual. When recontextualized as a basically pantheistic text, Ferenczi project makes sense as an attempt to navigate between the Scylla of the individualist liberalism of Freud's unconscious and the Charybdis of Jung's volkisch organic racial community. Borrowing from Jackie Wang, we could say that this text is an exploration of the 'manic defence against pain' symbolized by unitive experiences. In other words, Spinoza for marine biologists.
(1) See S.J. Gould's "Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy" in I Have Landed for an acerbic response to Freud's idea of recapitulaton & K. Peden's 'Alkaline Recapitulation: Haeckel's Hypothesis and the Afterlife of a Concept' (https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/alka...) for a careful conceptual history of recapitulation in the context of Romantic philosophies of nature. Peden compares Haeckel's work to an alkali, in contrast to Darwin's acidic corrosion:
"On the one hand, the notion of universal acid seems to connote a destruction or corrosion of form. On the other hand, however, the metaphor of the algorithm functions precisely as the bestowal of determinate form. This same duality is also present, as we have already seen, in Haeckel’s Romantic genealogy, in the contrasting influences of Goethe and Schelling... the essence of Haeckel’s biogenetic law is the eternally repeated return to the primordial absence of form, protoplasmic Urschleim, as a regenerative corrective to the relentless linearity of natural selection."
Peden helpfully traces the effects of Haeckel's oceanic recapitulation on contemporary theory:
"The schism between Darwin’s and Haeckel’s concepts is legible in the simple fact that The Origin of Species effectively undid the concept of species as such, affirming its transient, if not purely nominalist, quality, whereas Haeckel’s entire effort was geared toward discerning the figures of fixed species in the spatial representation of a temporal ontogenesis. For Haeckel, tracking this genesis was a source of inspiration, affirming a closeness to oceanic nature that in many instances appears to be a striking precursor to Freud’s death drive. Here, origin is indeed the goal. And it is this conceptual figure, rendered so explicit in the Haeckelian contribution to Darwinism, that we also find in contemporary theory and its antecedents in twentieth-century European thought. Phenomenology moves from a return to the lifeworld to returns to myriad other primordial instances: thrownness, the flesh of the world, auto-affective life. In each case thought tends toward a recapitulative access to the primordial instance in order to redeem its practices in the present. But self-professed antiphenomenologists are liable to the same charge. For Deleuze, the goal of thought is to restore its vocation in the “univocity of being,” finding restoration in a “single and same Ocean for all the drops.” For Badiou, confrontation with the primordial void is the condition for any authentically subjective accomplishment. In the end, however, it is hard to tell what the conceptual difference is between a total metaphysical excision of historical time and its maximal recapitulation in the fleeting instance of the originary void’s presence in what Badiou terms the Event. As for Slavoj Žižek, the same point about the void holds, but here *the Haeckelian specter arguably looms larger than Žižek’s own professed Hegelianism* [emphasis added]. His own intellectual itinerary—from Kant to Schelling to Hegel—might be aptly, if crassly, distilled in a simple formula: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates cosmogony."
***
Take two. This text is often annoying, but I'm increasingly convinced by its core claim - all of our desires, at their root, are a desire to return to our 'beautiful wet wife'. On reflection, the biological examples (the frog one is particularly memorable) aren't odious, just insistent. It's understandable why SF constantly brings up the desire for slime; this was a radical departure from the familialism of mainstream psychoanalysis that, amazingly enough, never dissolves into a collective unconscious. The ocean for SF is trans-individual: a space of relations that isn't itself an individual. When recontextualized as a basically pantheistic text, Ferenczi project makes sense as an attempt to navigate between the Scylla of the individualist liberalism of Freud's unconscious and the Charybdis of Jung's volkisch organic racial community. Borrowing from Jackie Wang, we could say that this text is an exploration of the 'manic defence against pain' symbolized by unitive experiences. In other words, Spinoza for marine biologists.
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November 25, 2022Comment:
Ferenczi was a great first generation psychoanalyst. It was Ferenczi, I believe, who was the first to point out that a sublimation is only a socially acceptable repression. Naturally, he was forced to recant this heresy. A pity; I believe this (Sublimation = socially acceptable repression) to be essentially correct. Also, Ferenczi, late in his career, maintained that recalled memories of 'infant seduction' weren't always fantasies, but sometimes rape. All in all, Ferenczi was a person who could ferret out mystifications, not only in enemies, but in allies too. - Very rare that.
This book is another (yet another!) entry in the wildly speculative 'anthropological' psychoanalysis of the first half of the last century. Besides Freud ("Totem and Taboo"), you will want to look at Geza Roheim ("Eternal Ones of the Dream") and Otto Rank ("Myth of the Birth of the Hero"). Another interesting point is how important Ernst Haeckel's 'recapitulation theory' was for Freud and Ferenczi. Freud's wildly speculative "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" makes this somewhat explicit. As does Ferenczi in this book:
"...the arrangements for the protection of the germ cells are not new creations, and so do not belong to caenogenesis, but that on the contrary they too represent a kind of recapitulation - the recapitulation, namely, of the environmental situations which have been experienced during the development of the species. (p. 46)"
And indeed, Ferenczi sees himself improving upon Haeckel by arguing that the embryonic fluid is itself a 'recapitulation' of an earlier state. (The state in question is the evolutionary stage when all life was in the sea.) Haeckel was called the 'German Darwin' in germanic central europe. His influence on early 20th century thought in the germano-sphere should not be forgotten.
The Book "Freud: Biologist of the Mind" by Frank Sulloway discusses all this in a useful and detailed manner.
If you are interested in the collision of anthropology and biology with psychoanalysis in its early years this book is a must.
Ferenczi was a great first generation psychoanalyst. It was Ferenczi, I believe, who was the first to point out that a sublimation is only a socially acceptable repression. Naturally, he was forced to recant this heresy. A pity; I believe this (Sublimation = socially acceptable repression) to be essentially correct. Also, Ferenczi, late in his career, maintained that recalled memories of 'infant seduction' weren't always fantasies, but sometimes rape. All in all, Ferenczi was a person who could ferret out mystifications, not only in enemies, but in allies too. - Very rare that.
This book is another (yet another!) entry in the wildly speculative 'anthropological' psychoanalysis of the first half of the last century. Besides Freud ("Totem and Taboo"), you will want to look at Geza Roheim ("Eternal Ones of the Dream") and Otto Rank ("Myth of the Birth of the Hero"). Another interesting point is how important Ernst Haeckel's 'recapitulation theory' was for Freud and Ferenczi. Freud's wildly speculative "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" makes this somewhat explicit. As does Ferenczi in this book:
"...the arrangements for the protection of the germ cells are not new creations, and so do not belong to caenogenesis, but that on the contrary they too represent a kind of recapitulation - the recapitulation, namely, of the environmental situations which have been experienced during the development of the species. (p. 46)"
And indeed, Ferenczi sees himself improving upon Haeckel by arguing that the embryonic fluid is itself a 'recapitulation' of an earlier state. (The state in question is the evolutionary stage when all life was in the sea.) Haeckel was called the 'German Darwin' in germanic central europe. His influence on early 20th century thought in the germano-sphere should not be forgotten.
The Book "Freud: Biologist of the Mind" by Frank Sulloway discusses all this in a useful and detailed manner.
If you are interested in the collision of anthropology and biology with psychoanalysis in its early years this book is a must.
May 25, 2026
Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (W. W Norton & Company, 1961).
• Introduction
o WWI translating Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
o These notions revolved around a fuller elucidation of the act of coitus, conceived in the Abhandlungen as the final phase in the total course of sexual development
o These ideas gradually crystallized into an onto- and phylogenetic theory which in 1915 I submitted to Professor Freud on the occasion of a visit of his to my military station.
o Later, in 1919, I repeated the exposition of this theory before him and before a small group of friends, and on both occasions was urged to write it out for publication. My failure for some time to act upon this invitation, though due in part to resistances engendered by the singularity of my material, was determined also by objective considerations.
o In my speculations on the problems of genitality I boldly transferred to animals, to their organs and the parts thereof, and to their tissues, all kinds of processes with which I had become acquainted through psychoanalysis; and if with the aid of this transposition I arrived at new points of view, I nevertheless became guilty of a psychomorphism which, as a methodological excess, weighed upon my scientific conscience.
o However, at the time when I was immersed in the Drei Abhandlungen} I was extraordinarily impressed by the fact that Freud was able to evaluate experiences gained in the field of the treatment of the psychoneuroses, and therefore in the mental realm, in such a way as to be in a position to reconstruct with the aid of these an entire chapter of biology, namely, the knowledge of sexual development.
o TLDR The physicist is able to make the phenomena of his science comprehensible only when he compares them to "forces", "attraction", "repulsion", to "resistance", "inertia", and the like-which are simply things with which we are acquainted from the mental side alone. But Freud also was compelled to reduce mental functioning to topographical, dynamic, economic, and therefore purely physical processes, for otherwise he was unable to approach their final explanation. Ultimately I perceived that we need not be ashamed of this reciprocal analogizing, that on the contrary it should be vigorously pushed as a highly necessary and, indeed, inevitable method.
• Ontrogenesis
• Chapter 1: Amphimixis of Eroticism in the Ejaculatory Act
o It was reserved for psychoanalysis to rescue the problems of sexuality from the poison cabinet of science in which they had been locked away for centuries.
o New attn needed on coitus itself in psychoanalysis
o Abraham on shit
o in normal ejaculation a synergetic harmony of anal and urethral innervations is essential, their presence going unrecognized owing perhaps only to the fact that each innervation normally covers up or masks the other
o the question presents itself whether the analysis of the ejaculatory act into its separate elements, which we have attempted in the preceding paragraphs, does not supply a means of conjecturing, even if only partially, the subtler processes involved in the establishing of genital primacy. For what I described in physiological terms as a coordination of urethral and anal innervations may be expressed in the vocabulary of the sexual theory as a synthesis or an integration of anal and urethral erotisms into genital erotism. I may be permitted to emphasize this new conception by giving it a name of its own; let us term such a synthesis of two or more erotisms in a higher unity the amphimixis of erotisms or instinct-components.
o how such an amphimixis might take place. Are actual nerve impulses transmitted from one organ to another or even from two organs to a third, or have we to do with chemical processes somewhat after the manner of an accumulation of endocrine products which reciprocally stimulate or inhibit one another?
o The question now presents itself whether the urethro-anal amphimixis which I have described cannot be corroborated by other kinds of linkages between these erotisms, whether other characteristics of coitus can also be referred to similar mixtures of erotisms, and finally whether these can be brought into harmony with the sexual theory.
Between urethral and anal autoerotism there seems in fact to exist a kind of reciprocity well prior to the establishing of genital primacy.
we should have to ascribe to the constitution of the admixture and to the finer or grosser apportionment of the ingredients of this combination of erotisms. an enormous importance as regards not only genital normality or individuality but character formation in particular. which latter. as Freud has taught us, is to be regarded as in large measure the psychic superstructure and the psychic transcript of these erotisms.
o The genital would then no longer be the unique and incomparable magic wand which conjures erotisms from all the organs of the body; on the contrary. genital amphimixis would merely be one particular instance out of the many in which such fusion of erotisms takes place. OKAY SANDOR
“mixtures and trarnspositions of eroticisms” “fusing” that’s his def of AMPHIMICTICALLY
• As examples of the displacement of erotic qualities I may further mention the shifting of erotism from the clitoris to the vagina described by Freud. the shifting of the erectile tendency to the nipple and the nares. and the tendency to blushing (erection of the entire head) on the part of the maiden who represses sexual excitement.
• SYNAETHESIAS
• Chapter 2: Coitus as An Amphimictic Phenomenon
o psychoanalytic assumption: amphimictic displacement downwards takes place not alone during the sex act but throughout life
o stages of development of libido: evolution from autoeroticisim via narcissism to genital object-love
o Psychoanalytic experience has established that the acts preparatory to coitus likewise have as their function the bringing about of an identification with the sexual partner through intimate contact and embraces. Kissing, stroking, biting, embracing serve to efface the boundaries between the egos of the sexual partners, so that during the sex act the man, for example, since he has as it were introjected the organ of the woman, need no longer have the feeling of having entrusted to a strange and therefore hazardous environment his most precious organ, the representative of his pleasure·ego
o THESIS: the purpose of this whole evolution, therefore the purpose likewise of the sex act, can be none other than an attempt on the part of the ego-an attempt at the beginning clumsy and fumbling, then more consciously purposive, and finally in part successful-to return to the mother's womb, where there is no such painful disharmony between ego and environment as characterizes existence in the external world.
The sex act achieves this transitory regression in a threefold manner: the whole organism attains this goal by purely hallucinatory means, somewhat as in sleep; the penis, with which the organism as a whole has identified itself, attains it partially or symbolically; while only the sexual secretion possesses the prerogative, as representative of the ego and its narcissistic double, the genital, of attaining in reality to the womb of the mother.
• Chapter 3 Stages in the Development of the Erotic Sense of Reality
o the human being is dominated from the moment of birth onwards by a continuous regressive trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation, and holds fast to this unswervingly by, as it were, magical-hallucinatory means, by the aid of positive and negative hallucinations.
o The full development of the reality sense is attained, according to this conception, only when this regression is renounced once and for all and a substitute found for it in the world of reality.
o We shall disclose the stages of the development of sexuality, described by Freud, as uncertain and fumbling yet increasingly outspoken attempts to attain the goal of returning to the maternal womb, whereas we must recognize in the final phase of the entire evolution-in the fully developed genital function, that is-the complete attainment of this goal.
o (in the sex act one succeeds in a real sense, even if in only a partial one, in returning to the maternal womb)
o regression to the mother
o 1. autoerotic. breast is first love-object. ectoparasite on its mother. cannibalism of mother (increasing aggressiveness to her). tooth as primal penis
o 2. narcissicsm/masturbation. child=faeces becomes child=penis (his hand’s hollow plays the part of the maternal genital)
o 3. In the last phase of development of the infantile libido the child returns. after the periods of passive object-love. after cannibalistic aggression and introversion. to the original object. the mother. but this time equipped with a more suitable weapon of attack. The erectile penis finds of itself the way to the maternal vagina. and would attain this goal did not the taboos of convention or perhaps a special defense mechanism or anxiety bring about a speedy end to this precocious redipus love.
o 4, latency
o 5. puberty
o GIRLS: The development of genital sexuality, cursorily described above in the male, undergoes in the female a rather sudden interruption. It is characterized above all else by the displacement of erogeneity from the clitoris (the female penis) to the cavity of the vagina.
recathexes of spatially remote and genetically superseded pleasure mechanisms to console herself for loss of penis
Of the transition on the part of the woman from (masculine) activity to passivity one may form the following general idea: the genitality of the female penis is absorbed regressively into the whole body and into the whole ego of the woman, out of which-amphimictically, as we believe-it had arisen, so that a secondary narcissism becomes her portion; on the erotic side, therefore, she becomes again more like a child who wants to be loved, and is thus a being who still clings in toto to the fiction of existence in the mother's womb.
identify herself with the child in her own body
secondary genitalization
• 4. Interpretation of the Individual Phenomena in the sex act
o After the foregoing considerations it will be worth while to subject to analysis, as though they were neurotic symptoms, the separate processes involved in the sex act.
o erection
I assume that the permanent invagination of the glans penis within a fold of mucous membrane (within the foreskin, that is) is itself nothing but a replica in miniature of existence in the maternal womb.
• From the standpoint of the ego we have already described ejaculation as such an elimination of material productive of "unpleasure"; we may assume a similar tendency also in the case of erection and friction
• erection is perhaps only an incomplete achieved attempt to detach the genital, charged with “unlust” of various kinds, from the rest of the body
o thrusting
the impulse to genital friction suggests the conjecture that the unpleasure accumulated in the whole body is sstored in the genitals in the form of an itching, which is then removed by a kind of scratching
o courtship
qtd Darwin: "the female does not take the male that seems most attractive to her but the one that is least repulsive to her."
We conjecture therefore that in the course of courtship the female is duped by a hypnotic regression to the maternal womb, and that this fantastic situation of happiness indemnifies her for the endurance of the intrinsically non-pleasurable sex act. LOL
o emotions
One is forced to maintain that the mutual attraction is nothing but the expression of the fantasy of veritably merging one's self with the body of the partner or perhaps of forcing one's way in toto into it (as a substitute for the mother's womb);
The tension which during coitus keeps the participants in a kind of suspense is in itself unpleasurable, and only the expectation of its prospective relief makes it at the same time pleasurable. This kind of unpleasurable tension has a good deal of similarity to anxiety, which, as we know from Freud, is always a reproduction of the unpleasurable sensations connected with the shock attending the process of being born
o fast breathing, heart rate
These disturbances suggest a recapitulation of the process of accomplishing that extensive adjustment which the change from the faetal to the extrauterine mode of oxygen supply demands.
o the violence of it
trauma experienced during birth, especially the imprisonment in the birth canal, evokes not only anxiety but rage as well
• 5. Genital Functioning in the Individual
o The fact that the human being succeeds in surviving the serious danger involved in birth, together with the pleasure derived from discovering the possibility of existence outside of the maternal womb-both of these remain indelibly impressed upon the mind and impel to a periodic re-creating of a similar albeit attenuated danger, for the sheer pleasure of again enjoying its conquest. It is possible that the temporary return to the maternal womb and the simultaneous playful repetition and overcoming of all the dangers inherent in the birth struggle and the life struggle of adaptation, which are experienced in coitus, act in a revivifying manner in the same sense as does the nightly regression of sleep.
• 6. The Phylogenetic Parallel
o The point of departure for all the speculations which follow was, it may be stated at once, the extraordinary frequency with which, in the most varied creations of the mind, both normal and pathological, in the products of the individual and the collective psyche, both the sexual act and the intrauterine situation are expressed by the symbol of the fish, that is, the depiction of a fish moving or swimming in the water
o The fantastic idea leapt to mind as to whether, over and above the purely external similarity between the situation of the penis in the vagina, the fetus in the uterus, and the fish in the water, there might not also be expressed in this symbolism a bit of phylogenetic recognition of our descent from aquatic vertebrates
o THESIS
what if the entire intrauterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized that aboriginal piscineperiod, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?
In the development of the means of protection of the embryo there is contained a bit of the history of the species
Individual observations of the symbolism of dreams and neuroses reveal a fundamental symbolic identification of the mother's body with the waters of the sea and the sea itself on the one hand, and on the other with "Mother Earth", provider of nourishment.
Since the individual identifies himself with the phallus inserted in the vagina and with the spermatazoa swarming into the body of the female, he also repeats symbolically the danger of death which his animal ancestors victoriously overcame in the geological cataclysm of the drying up of the sea.
Let us therefore not be misled by this conception; let us adhere to the assumption that in genitality is to be found the expression. and perhaps even the belated abreaction. of not alone an ontogenetic but also a phylogenetic catastrophe.
Fishies fear of sea drying up=womb safe=coitus good
• 7. Evidence for the “Thalassal Regressive Trend”
o Thalassal regressive trend DEF: the striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval time
o the parallel which exists between the method of sexual intercourse and the structural formation of the genitalia, on the one hand, and the aquatic mode of existence followed by a land-dwelling and air-breathing manner o life on the other.
o It would surprise me if this arrangement of rhythmic rocking had not been poetically compared by some naturalist or other to the surging of the sea-though in the last analysis this is more than merely a figure of speech.
• 8. Coitus and Fertilization
o coitus is naught else than the freeing of the individual from burdensome tension, simultaneous with the gratification of the impulse towards regression to the maternal womb and to that prototype of everything maternal, the sea
o soma and germaplasm
• 9. Coitus and Sleep
o In my Stages of Development of the Reality Sense the first sleep of the newborn-to which the careful isolation, the warm swaddling by mother or nurse contribute-was described as a replica of the intrauterine state. The child, frightened, crying, shaken by the traumatic experience of birth, soon becomes lulled in this sleeping state which creates in him a feeling-on a reality basis, on the one hand, and on the other hallucinatorily, that is, illusorily-as though no such tremendous shock had occurred at all.
o Freud has said, indeed, that strictly speaking the human being is not completely born; he is not born in the full sense, seeing that through going nightly to bed he spends half his life in, as it were, the mother's womb_
o Both coitus and sleep are intrauterine. coitus are therefore both the beginning and the end of the development towards "erotic reality" hitherto undergone.
o The sleeper is an autoerotic; he represents in toto a child who is enjoying repose inside his mother's body and who in his absolutely narcissistic absorption is altogether indifferent to the environment. The individual indulging in the sex act must make many detailed preparations, must above all secure a suitable object, and thus evidence a much higher degree of reality sense, before he is able in orgasm to vouchsafe to himself in toto the illusion of happiness similar to that which sleep provides
o Characteristic of both phenomena, sleep and coitus, is the exclusion of external stimuli, the giving up of the "life of relationships" (to use Liebeault's expreSSion
o Same body postures (foetal)
o Respiration changes
o Muscular innervation ocular
o Change sin temp
o Social sleeping habits
o Genetic relationsip betw4een sleep and genitality
• 10. Bioanalytic Conclusions
o at first blush
• 11. Male and Female
• Introduction
o WWI translating Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
o These notions revolved around a fuller elucidation of the act of coitus, conceived in the Abhandlungen as the final phase in the total course of sexual development
o These ideas gradually crystallized into an onto- and phylogenetic theory which in 1915 I submitted to Professor Freud on the occasion of a visit of his to my military station.
o Later, in 1919, I repeated the exposition of this theory before him and before a small group of friends, and on both occasions was urged to write it out for publication. My failure for some time to act upon this invitation, though due in part to resistances engendered by the singularity of my material, was determined also by objective considerations.
o In my speculations on the problems of genitality I boldly transferred to animals, to their organs and the parts thereof, and to their tissues, all kinds of processes with which I had become acquainted through psychoanalysis; and if with the aid of this transposition I arrived at new points of view, I nevertheless became guilty of a psychomorphism which, as a methodological excess, weighed upon my scientific conscience.
o However, at the time when I was immersed in the Drei Abhandlungen} I was extraordinarily impressed by the fact that Freud was able to evaluate experiences gained in the field of the treatment of the psychoneuroses, and therefore in the mental realm, in such a way as to be in a position to reconstruct with the aid of these an entire chapter of biology, namely, the knowledge of sexual development.
o TLDR The physicist is able to make the phenomena of his science comprehensible only when he compares them to "forces", "attraction", "repulsion", to "resistance", "inertia", and the like-which are simply things with which we are acquainted from the mental side alone. But Freud also was compelled to reduce mental functioning to topographical, dynamic, economic, and therefore purely physical processes, for otherwise he was unable to approach their final explanation. Ultimately I perceived that we need not be ashamed of this reciprocal analogizing, that on the contrary it should be vigorously pushed as a highly necessary and, indeed, inevitable method.
• Ontrogenesis
• Chapter 1: Amphimixis of Eroticism in the Ejaculatory Act
o It was reserved for psychoanalysis to rescue the problems of sexuality from the poison cabinet of science in which they had been locked away for centuries.
o New attn needed on coitus itself in psychoanalysis
o Abraham on shit
o in normal ejaculation a synergetic harmony of anal and urethral innervations is essential, their presence going unrecognized owing perhaps only to the fact that each innervation normally covers up or masks the other
o the question presents itself whether the analysis of the ejaculatory act into its separate elements, which we have attempted in the preceding paragraphs, does not supply a means of conjecturing, even if only partially, the subtler processes involved in the establishing of genital primacy. For what I described in physiological terms as a coordination of urethral and anal innervations may be expressed in the vocabulary of the sexual theory as a synthesis or an integration of anal and urethral erotisms into genital erotism. I may be permitted to emphasize this new conception by giving it a name of its own; let us term such a synthesis of two or more erotisms in a higher unity the amphimixis of erotisms or instinct-components.
o how such an amphimixis might take place. Are actual nerve impulses transmitted from one organ to another or even from two organs to a third, or have we to do with chemical processes somewhat after the manner of an accumulation of endocrine products which reciprocally stimulate or inhibit one another?
o The question now presents itself whether the urethro-anal amphimixis which I have described cannot be corroborated by other kinds of linkages between these erotisms, whether other characteristics of coitus can also be referred to similar mixtures of erotisms, and finally whether these can be brought into harmony with the sexual theory.
Between urethral and anal autoerotism there seems in fact to exist a kind of reciprocity well prior to the establishing of genital primacy.
we should have to ascribe to the constitution of the admixture and to the finer or grosser apportionment of the ingredients of this combination of erotisms. an enormous importance as regards not only genital normality or individuality but character formation in particular. which latter. as Freud has taught us, is to be regarded as in large measure the psychic superstructure and the psychic transcript of these erotisms.
o The genital would then no longer be the unique and incomparable magic wand which conjures erotisms from all the organs of the body; on the contrary. genital amphimixis would merely be one particular instance out of the many in which such fusion of erotisms takes place. OKAY SANDOR
“mixtures and trarnspositions of eroticisms” “fusing” that’s his def of AMPHIMICTICALLY
• As examples of the displacement of erotic qualities I may further mention the shifting of erotism from the clitoris to the vagina described by Freud. the shifting of the erectile tendency to the nipple and the nares. and the tendency to blushing (erection of the entire head) on the part of the maiden who represses sexual excitement.
• SYNAETHESIAS
• Chapter 2: Coitus as An Amphimictic Phenomenon
o psychoanalytic assumption: amphimictic displacement downwards takes place not alone during the sex act but throughout life
o stages of development of libido: evolution from autoeroticisim via narcissism to genital object-love
o Psychoanalytic experience has established that the acts preparatory to coitus likewise have as their function the bringing about of an identification with the sexual partner through intimate contact and embraces. Kissing, stroking, biting, embracing serve to efface the boundaries between the egos of the sexual partners, so that during the sex act the man, for example, since he has as it were introjected the organ of the woman, need no longer have the feeling of having entrusted to a strange and therefore hazardous environment his most precious organ, the representative of his pleasure·ego
o THESIS: the purpose of this whole evolution, therefore the purpose likewise of the sex act, can be none other than an attempt on the part of the ego-an attempt at the beginning clumsy and fumbling, then more consciously purposive, and finally in part successful-to return to the mother's womb, where there is no such painful disharmony between ego and environment as characterizes existence in the external world.
The sex act achieves this transitory regression in a threefold manner: the whole organism attains this goal by purely hallucinatory means, somewhat as in sleep; the penis, with which the organism as a whole has identified itself, attains it partially or symbolically; while only the sexual secretion possesses the prerogative, as representative of the ego and its narcissistic double, the genital, of attaining in reality to the womb of the mother.
• Chapter 3 Stages in the Development of the Erotic Sense of Reality
o the human being is dominated from the moment of birth onwards by a continuous regressive trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation, and holds fast to this unswervingly by, as it were, magical-hallucinatory means, by the aid of positive and negative hallucinations.
o The full development of the reality sense is attained, according to this conception, only when this regression is renounced once and for all and a substitute found for it in the world of reality.
o We shall disclose the stages of the development of sexuality, described by Freud, as uncertain and fumbling yet increasingly outspoken attempts to attain the goal of returning to the maternal womb, whereas we must recognize in the final phase of the entire evolution-in the fully developed genital function, that is-the complete attainment of this goal.
o (in the sex act one succeeds in a real sense, even if in only a partial one, in returning to the maternal womb)
o regression to the mother
o 1. autoerotic. breast is first love-object. ectoparasite on its mother. cannibalism of mother (increasing aggressiveness to her). tooth as primal penis
o 2. narcissicsm/masturbation. child=faeces becomes child=penis (his hand’s hollow plays the part of the maternal genital)
o 3. In the last phase of development of the infantile libido the child returns. after the periods of passive object-love. after cannibalistic aggression and introversion. to the original object. the mother. but this time equipped with a more suitable weapon of attack. The erectile penis finds of itself the way to the maternal vagina. and would attain this goal did not the taboos of convention or perhaps a special defense mechanism or anxiety bring about a speedy end to this precocious redipus love.
o 4, latency
o 5. puberty
o GIRLS: The development of genital sexuality, cursorily described above in the male, undergoes in the female a rather sudden interruption. It is characterized above all else by the displacement of erogeneity from the clitoris (the female penis) to the cavity of the vagina.
recathexes of spatially remote and genetically superseded pleasure mechanisms to console herself for loss of penis
Of the transition on the part of the woman from (masculine) activity to passivity one may form the following general idea: the genitality of the female penis is absorbed regressively into the whole body and into the whole ego of the woman, out of which-amphimictically, as we believe-it had arisen, so that a secondary narcissism becomes her portion; on the erotic side, therefore, she becomes again more like a child who wants to be loved, and is thus a being who still clings in toto to the fiction of existence in the mother's womb.
identify herself with the child in her own body
secondary genitalization
• 4. Interpretation of the Individual Phenomena in the sex act
o After the foregoing considerations it will be worth while to subject to analysis, as though they were neurotic symptoms, the separate processes involved in the sex act.
o erection
I assume that the permanent invagination of the glans penis within a fold of mucous membrane (within the foreskin, that is) is itself nothing but a replica in miniature of existence in the maternal womb.
• From the standpoint of the ego we have already described ejaculation as such an elimination of material productive of "unpleasure"; we may assume a similar tendency also in the case of erection and friction
• erection is perhaps only an incomplete achieved attempt to detach the genital, charged with “unlust” of various kinds, from the rest of the body
o thrusting
the impulse to genital friction suggests the conjecture that the unpleasure accumulated in the whole body is sstored in the genitals in the form of an itching, which is then removed by a kind of scratching
o courtship
qtd Darwin: "the female does not take the male that seems most attractive to her but the one that is least repulsive to her."
We conjecture therefore that in the course of courtship the female is duped by a hypnotic regression to the maternal womb, and that this fantastic situation of happiness indemnifies her for the endurance of the intrinsically non-pleasurable sex act. LOL
o emotions
One is forced to maintain that the mutual attraction is nothing but the expression of the fantasy of veritably merging one's self with the body of the partner or perhaps of forcing one's way in toto into it (as a substitute for the mother's womb);
The tension which during coitus keeps the participants in a kind of suspense is in itself unpleasurable, and only the expectation of its prospective relief makes it at the same time pleasurable. This kind of unpleasurable tension has a good deal of similarity to anxiety, which, as we know from Freud, is always a reproduction of the unpleasurable sensations connected with the shock attending the process of being born
o fast breathing, heart rate
These disturbances suggest a recapitulation of the process of accomplishing that extensive adjustment which the change from the faetal to the extrauterine mode of oxygen supply demands.
o the violence of it
trauma experienced during birth, especially the imprisonment in the birth canal, evokes not only anxiety but rage as well
• 5. Genital Functioning in the Individual
o The fact that the human being succeeds in surviving the serious danger involved in birth, together with the pleasure derived from discovering the possibility of existence outside of the maternal womb-both of these remain indelibly impressed upon the mind and impel to a periodic re-creating of a similar albeit attenuated danger, for the sheer pleasure of again enjoying its conquest. It is possible that the temporary return to the maternal womb and the simultaneous playful repetition and overcoming of all the dangers inherent in the birth struggle and the life struggle of adaptation, which are experienced in coitus, act in a revivifying manner in the same sense as does the nightly regression of sleep.
• 6. The Phylogenetic Parallel
o The point of departure for all the speculations which follow was, it may be stated at once, the extraordinary frequency with which, in the most varied creations of the mind, both normal and pathological, in the products of the individual and the collective psyche, both the sexual act and the intrauterine situation are expressed by the symbol of the fish, that is, the depiction of a fish moving or swimming in the water
o The fantastic idea leapt to mind as to whether, over and above the purely external similarity between the situation of the penis in the vagina, the fetus in the uterus, and the fish in the water, there might not also be expressed in this symbolism a bit of phylogenetic recognition of our descent from aquatic vertebrates
o THESIS
what if the entire intrauterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized that aboriginal piscineperiod, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?
In the development of the means of protection of the embryo there is contained a bit of the history of the species
Individual observations of the symbolism of dreams and neuroses reveal a fundamental symbolic identification of the mother's body with the waters of the sea and the sea itself on the one hand, and on the other with "Mother Earth", provider of nourishment.
Since the individual identifies himself with the phallus inserted in the vagina and with the spermatazoa swarming into the body of the female, he also repeats symbolically the danger of death which his animal ancestors victoriously overcame in the geological cataclysm of the drying up of the sea.
Let us therefore not be misled by this conception; let us adhere to the assumption that in genitality is to be found the expression. and perhaps even the belated abreaction. of not alone an ontogenetic but also a phylogenetic catastrophe.
Fishies fear of sea drying up=womb safe=coitus good
• 7. Evidence for the “Thalassal Regressive Trend”
o Thalassal regressive trend DEF: the striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval time
o the parallel which exists between the method of sexual intercourse and the structural formation of the genitalia, on the one hand, and the aquatic mode of existence followed by a land-dwelling and air-breathing manner o life on the other.
o It would surprise me if this arrangement of rhythmic rocking had not been poetically compared by some naturalist or other to the surging of the sea-though in the last analysis this is more than merely a figure of speech.
• 8. Coitus and Fertilization
o coitus is naught else than the freeing of the individual from burdensome tension, simultaneous with the gratification of the impulse towards regression to the maternal womb and to that prototype of everything maternal, the sea
o soma and germaplasm
• 9. Coitus and Sleep
o In my Stages of Development of the Reality Sense the first sleep of the newborn-to which the careful isolation, the warm swaddling by mother or nurse contribute-was described as a replica of the intrauterine state. The child, frightened, crying, shaken by the traumatic experience of birth, soon becomes lulled in this sleeping state which creates in him a feeling-on a reality basis, on the one hand, and on the other hallucinatorily, that is, illusorily-as though no such tremendous shock had occurred at all.
o Freud has said, indeed, that strictly speaking the human being is not completely born; he is not born in the full sense, seeing that through going nightly to bed he spends half his life in, as it were, the mother's womb_
o Both coitus and sleep are intrauterine. coitus are therefore both the beginning and the end of the development towards "erotic reality" hitherto undergone.
o The sleeper is an autoerotic; he represents in toto a child who is enjoying repose inside his mother's body and who in his absolutely narcissistic absorption is altogether indifferent to the environment. The individual indulging in the sex act must make many detailed preparations, must above all secure a suitable object, and thus evidence a much higher degree of reality sense, before he is able in orgasm to vouchsafe to himself in toto the illusion of happiness similar to that which sleep provides
o Characteristic of both phenomena, sleep and coitus, is the exclusion of external stimuli, the giving up of the "life of relationships" (to use Liebeault's expreSSion
o Same body postures (foetal)
o Respiration changes
o Muscular innervation ocular
o Change sin temp
o Social sleeping habits
o Genetic relationsip betw4een sleep and genitality
• 10. Bioanalytic Conclusions
o at first blush
• 11. Male and Female
November 16, 2023
Sandor Ferenczi was a frequent collaborator of Sigmund Freud and aided in the development and maturity of psychology through psychoanalytic theory. However, as Freud was also megalomaniacal, he did not want anyone else to have disparate opinions from him in his understanding of psychoanalysis. Eventually, all his closest collaborators broke free and developed their own concepts of psychology. Foremost among these was Carl Jung. Ferenczi, on the other hand, was no slouch. In the more modern practice of psychology, his belief that the therapist had to be empathetic to the patient remains relevant (which was in contrast to the Freudian conception of therapists being disinterested).
In essence, Thalassa is Ferenczi's theory that humans seek to return to the maternal womb, and that the act of sex and sleep manifest these human attempts.
Psychology has matured a lot nowadays, and more and more psychologists view Freud as a figure of historical insight, rather than scientific relevance. Thalassa, as a reflection of Freud's thought through one of his most ardent followers, show that he was a man entrapped within the thinking of his time. This is evident with his claim that "all libido is masculine, even when, in the female, it seeks gratification of a passive type."
The woman is merely conceptualized as a passive participant: during sex, for instance, the female can only "be made amenable to tolerating the sex act on the part of the male." Read from a modern lens, these perspectives are patriarchal and arguably misogynistic.
Ferenczi's hypotheses are also occasionally problematic: he posits that the teeth in children slowly appear because of their desire to consume and then return to the womb, although failing because it can't bite through flesh.
I also find that the suggestion of Ferenczi that women are second-rate as problematic: because the woman is a passive acceptor (she does not have a penis), she is second-best because she cannot penetrate. His viewpoints are also socially problematic in that courting is seen as a male subjugating the female, as if the dynamic were between a lord and a vassal.
While Ferenczi mentions that this is merely a matter of evolution manifesting itself, there are significant counterexamples to the peacock's iridescent color and size. The black widow, for example, is twice as large as her male counterpart, and might even devour him after mating; similarly, the female of the praying mantis may also eat her mate after their copulation.
The problematic fixation with sexuality in early psychoanalytic theory also evinces itself in Thalassa: it has even thought of insomnia as sexual, rather as rooted in anxiety, or other more relevant matters. Thalassa even mentions that the tension during the sex act is unpleasurable, which has clearly been debunked by billions of people who perform the sex act because of love. Thus, from a modern sociological framework, Thalassa has been debunked. What about the science it alludes to?
Sadly, Ferenczi, despite also being a medical doctor himself, alluded to Ernst Haeckel whose biogenetic law has been soundly disproved. He showed that in the human embryo, humans can also be observed to have gill slits. In modern embryology, however, the development and evolution of these gill slits have been traced, and they do not serve as organs of respiration: they will later become our inner ear. We do not breathe through these gill slits, and just because they look similar doesn't mean they function similarly.
Another crime against biological science was Ferenczi's faith in Lamarck. Lamarck argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited, which is clearly stupid (and concerning). An example would be that if someone developed diabetes, he would pass that diabetes on to his offspring - and that's never the case. Modern science has viewed his theory as a historical note, but of no scientific relevance.
I laughed when Ferenczi even argued that the smell of female vaginas meant that they subconsciously desired to return to the womb, because that's clearly untrue. People also don't have lower oxygen saturation when they are sleeping - normal people have an oxygen saturation between 95 to 100% whether they're awake or asleep.
All in all, Ferenczi himself admits of the questionable nature of Freudian psychoanalytic theory: "Of psychoanalysis it is said (although with undoubted exaggeration of the actual facts) that it would fain account for everything on the basis of sexuality." This was the problem with Freud; as a corollary, this was also the problem with Ferenczi's Thalassa.
In essence, Thalassa is Ferenczi's theory that humans seek to return to the maternal womb, and that the act of sex and sleep manifest these human attempts.
Psychology has matured a lot nowadays, and more and more psychologists view Freud as a figure of historical insight, rather than scientific relevance. Thalassa, as a reflection of Freud's thought through one of his most ardent followers, show that he was a man entrapped within the thinking of his time. This is evident with his claim that "all libido is masculine, even when, in the female, it seeks gratification of a passive type."
The woman is merely conceptualized as a passive participant: during sex, for instance, the female can only "be made amenable to tolerating the sex act on the part of the male." Read from a modern lens, these perspectives are patriarchal and arguably misogynistic.
Ferenczi's hypotheses are also occasionally problematic: he posits that the teeth in children slowly appear because of their desire to consume and then return to the womb, although failing because it can't bite through flesh.
I also find that the suggestion of Ferenczi that women are second-rate as problematic: because the woman is a passive acceptor (she does not have a penis), she is second-best because she cannot penetrate. His viewpoints are also socially problematic in that courting is seen as a male subjugating the female, as if the dynamic were between a lord and a vassal.
While Ferenczi mentions that this is merely a matter of evolution manifesting itself, there are significant counterexamples to the peacock's iridescent color and size. The black widow, for example, is twice as large as her male counterpart, and might even devour him after mating; similarly, the female of the praying mantis may also eat her mate after their copulation.
The problematic fixation with sexuality in early psychoanalytic theory also evinces itself in Thalassa: it has even thought of insomnia as sexual, rather as rooted in anxiety, or other more relevant matters. Thalassa even mentions that the tension during the sex act is unpleasurable, which has clearly been debunked by billions of people who perform the sex act because of love. Thus, from a modern sociological framework, Thalassa has been debunked. What about the science it alludes to?
Sadly, Ferenczi, despite also being a medical doctor himself, alluded to Ernst Haeckel whose biogenetic law has been soundly disproved. He showed that in the human embryo, humans can also be observed to have gill slits. In modern embryology, however, the development and evolution of these gill slits have been traced, and they do not serve as organs of respiration: they will later become our inner ear. We do not breathe through these gill slits, and just because they look similar doesn't mean they function similarly.
Another crime against biological science was Ferenczi's faith in Lamarck. Lamarck argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited, which is clearly stupid (and concerning). An example would be that if someone developed diabetes, he would pass that diabetes on to his offspring - and that's never the case. Modern science has viewed his theory as a historical note, but of no scientific relevance.
I laughed when Ferenczi even argued that the smell of female vaginas meant that they subconsciously desired to return to the womb, because that's clearly untrue. People also don't have lower oxygen saturation when they are sleeping - normal people have an oxygen saturation between 95 to 100% whether they're awake or asleep.
All in all, Ferenczi himself admits of the questionable nature of Freudian psychoanalytic theory: "Of psychoanalysis it is said (although with undoubted exaggeration of the actual facts) that it would fain account for everything on the basis of sexuality." This was the problem with Freud; as a corollary, this was also the problem with Ferenczi's Thalassa.
July 15, 2024
Just as psychoanalysis grew out of a voyage into the ‘metaphysical’ to explain seemingly vague and non-causal behaviors like hysteria (on the assumption that it would be able to repay its debts later when a strict neurological basis was discovered, hundreds of years later), Ferenczi reverses this ray of speculation by having his starting point in Freud’s science and pointing towards biology (‘metapsychology’). Of course, towards the end he admits that there is nothing that can be done for the unbelieving reader, and it would seem that the strongest links between the two are, nevertheless, analogies.
The convergence of the two fields & point of departure for this project is, surprise, sexuality. Besides many other small conclusions here and there, the major foundation for the rest of the work and study of phylogenetic trends is the formation of the genitals as a port for the entire body’s sum of erotic tension, a way of relieving “unpleasure” that is built up by any act which is not in direct conformity with our pleasure principle. In this way it also acts as a “double” for our ego, the organ with divine right, our representative. What strikes me about this is its seeming distance from Freud - unless I am mistaken - by using a negative definition of pleasure. As the story goes, we are born as parasites first upon our parents, then on the world at large - we want, we want, we want, etc etc. However, by denying ourselves an immediate want for something more advantageous later (the imposition of the reality principle) we are apparently acting against our own will - we are acting creatively. Ferenczi doesn’t let us get too carried away, though - the phylogenetic analysis section shows us that our primary desire as living beings is the return to an ultimate state of equilibrium, that which we had in the womb.
He ties in the development of mammals and all vertebrates from aquatic life, and draws analogies between the amniotic fluid of the uterus with the sea, the trauma of birth with the lowering of sea levels during the Ice Age & forced adaptation to land (fish —> amphibian —> mammals/reptiles), and so on. What’s interesting here is that we can no longer assume that the ‘purpose’ of coitus is procreation, but instead reflects an internal drive within the individual to return to a protected fetal state and/or life in the sea (these become basically interchangeable, since people themselves are equally unaware of these prehistoric drives).
I’m ambivalent on this work - do I “agree” with it? It’s hard to say. On one hand, this deepens the foothold of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic tool. It’s remarkable how much can be explained by starting with the individual psyche and its drives. On the other hand, there’s a kind of crude objectification of life itself that seems to take place when everything is chalked up to drives that are materially rooted & reflect base needs. Nabokov had this line about Freud/Lacan - “they make a lot of money” which is to say that, as a psychologist, that’s what you do - you are a person who claims to have the skeleton key to all of a person’s motivations and actions, and you tell them they are neurotic, in need of a cure. It works by reducing the plane of human action to re-action, and so you have to double down and put all your savings on it with the hope of some utility payout.
The convergence of the two fields & point of departure for this project is, surprise, sexuality. Besides many other small conclusions here and there, the major foundation for the rest of the work and study of phylogenetic trends is the formation of the genitals as a port for the entire body’s sum of erotic tension, a way of relieving “unpleasure” that is built up by any act which is not in direct conformity with our pleasure principle. In this way it also acts as a “double” for our ego, the organ with divine right, our representative. What strikes me about this is its seeming distance from Freud - unless I am mistaken - by using a negative definition of pleasure. As the story goes, we are born as parasites first upon our parents, then on the world at large - we want, we want, we want, etc etc. However, by denying ourselves an immediate want for something more advantageous later (the imposition of the reality principle) we are apparently acting against our own will - we are acting creatively. Ferenczi doesn’t let us get too carried away, though - the phylogenetic analysis section shows us that our primary desire as living beings is the return to an ultimate state of equilibrium, that which we had in the womb.
He ties in the development of mammals and all vertebrates from aquatic life, and draws analogies between the amniotic fluid of the uterus with the sea, the trauma of birth with the lowering of sea levels during the Ice Age & forced adaptation to land (fish —> amphibian —> mammals/reptiles), and so on. What’s interesting here is that we can no longer assume that the ‘purpose’ of coitus is procreation, but instead reflects an internal drive within the individual to return to a protected fetal state and/or life in the sea (these become basically interchangeable, since people themselves are equally unaware of these prehistoric drives).
I’m ambivalent on this work - do I “agree” with it? It’s hard to say. On one hand, this deepens the foothold of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic tool. It’s remarkable how much can be explained by starting with the individual psyche and its drives. On the other hand, there’s a kind of crude objectification of life itself that seems to take place when everything is chalked up to drives that are materially rooted & reflect base needs. Nabokov had this line about Freud/Lacan - “they make a lot of money” which is to say that, as a psychologist, that’s what you do - you are a person who claims to have the skeleton key to all of a person’s motivations and actions, and you tell them they are neurotic, in need of a cure. It works by reducing the plane of human action to re-action, and so you have to double down and put all your savings on it with the hope of some utility payout.
Read
March 31, 2025Unhinged theorizing that one could only get from 20th-century psychoanalysis.
Following Freud, Darwinism, or perhaps Lorenz Oken's naturphilosphie, Ferenczi lays out his theory of 'genitality', whose central idea is that "the human being is dominated from the moment of birth onwards by a continuous regressive trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation."
This is not a shocking claim for any overzealous psychoanalyst. But Ferenczi goes further into the realm of the scandalous: What if the desire to return to the womb is only a replica of the deeper desire to be fish (or frog) once again?
Ferenczi then jumps from one analogy to another, such as the sea's rhythms being similar to the rocking motions required in the development of embryos and eggs and comforting newly-born babies.
Perhaps most interesting of his ravings are his reveries on geotrauma, and his sleek incorporation of Freud's theory of the inorganic with death and sex. I will quote at length, here:
"In the act of coitus and in the simultaneous act of fertilization there are fused into a single unity not alone the individual catastrophe of birth and the most recent catastrophe to the species, that of desiccation, but all the earlier catastrophes since life originated as well; so that we have represented in the sensation of orgasm not only the repose of the intrauterine state, the tranquil existence in a more friendly environment, but also the repose of the era before life originated, in other words, the deathlike repose of the inorganic world."
But Ferenczi's theorizing sometimes gets so ridiculous that it borders on comedy. Check out this quote, of which I will say nothing further:
"I will refer to the peculiar fact that the genital secretion of the female among the higher mammals and in man, the erotically stimulating effect of which, as we have said, may be traceable to infantile reminiscences, possesses a distinctly fishy odor (odor of herring brine), according to the description of all physiologists: this odor of the vagina comes from the same substance (trimethylamine) as the decomposition of fish gives rise to."
Hilarious. Certainly something to read with a bucket of salt.
Following Freud, Darwinism, or perhaps Lorenz Oken's naturphilosphie, Ferenczi lays out his theory of 'genitality', whose central idea is that "the human being is dominated from the moment of birth onwards by a continuous regressive trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation."
This is not a shocking claim for any overzealous psychoanalyst. But Ferenczi goes further into the realm of the scandalous: What if the desire to return to the womb is only a replica of the deeper desire to be fish (or frog) once again?
Ferenczi then jumps from one analogy to another, such as the sea's rhythms being similar to the rocking motions required in the development of embryos and eggs and comforting newly-born babies.
Perhaps most interesting of his ravings are his reveries on geotrauma, and his sleek incorporation of Freud's theory of the inorganic with death and sex. I will quote at length, here:
"In the act of coitus and in the simultaneous act of fertilization there are fused into a single unity not alone the individual catastrophe of birth and the most recent catastrophe to the species, that of desiccation, but all the earlier catastrophes since life originated as well; so that we have represented in the sensation of orgasm not only the repose of the intrauterine state, the tranquil existence in a more friendly environment, but also the repose of the era before life originated, in other words, the deathlike repose of the inorganic world."
But Ferenczi's theorizing sometimes gets so ridiculous that it borders on comedy. Check out this quote, of which I will say nothing further:
"I will refer to the peculiar fact that the genital secretion of the female among the higher mammals and in man, the erotically stimulating effect of which, as we have said, may be traceable to infantile reminiscences, possesses a distinctly fishy odor (odor of herring brine), according to the description of all physiologists: this odor of the vagina comes from the same substance (trimethylamine) as the decomposition of fish gives rise to."
Hilarious. Certainly something to read with a bucket of salt.
April 29, 2022
This little book and I have some history. I bought a copy of the first edition from John K. King Books almost twenty years ago and every time I tried to read it, I couldn't get past the first five pages. Then I picked it up between book shipments a few weeks ago and I was able to follow the text. It actually made sense! Well, as much sense as Freudians make.
Let's tear into Ferenczi's argument, shall we? Ejaculation unites the anal and urethral tendencies after a period of scratching to relieve 'unpleasantness'. (Towards the end he admits evolution could make sex pleasurable, but most of the text refers to the necessity of the tension of unpleasure.) Psychoanalytically, sex allows the individual to "...reexperience the pleasure of intrauterine existence, the anxiety of birth, and the subsequent pleasure in surmounting this latter danger successfully." (page 49) Ferenczi then expands this symbolism so that it represents the catastrophe of the seas drying up. Then he continues to expand the psychoanalysis by specifying five catastrophes where the evolution of organic life aligns with sexual equivalents. (I'll spare you the table.) If that's not wild enough, Ferenczi occasionally throws in some Lamarckian analogies too.
Of course, it wouldn't be Freudian if the author didn't misunderstand or ignore female anatomy and experience. For example, Ferenczi theorizes that vaginas may have developed from cloaca and therefore have a 'cavity-eroticism'. Sex then creates a kind of 'anal distress' which he speculates "...may have led to pleasurable sensations in which the female was able to find a substitutive solace." (page 59) (Trust me, when it's good, it's NOT substitutive.)
Then there's a couple of random sexist bits that could use fact checking. Does the vagina really smell like herring brine because it emits trimethylamine? (page 57) (I've been in close proximity to several vaginas, but never encountered herring brine. Let me know if you have.) Last but not least, do the Samoyed women really stop menstruating during the dark winter months? I have a really hard time buying that one.
Only read if you like Freudian psychoanalysis and some weird analogies.
Let's tear into Ferenczi's argument, shall we? Ejaculation unites the anal and urethral tendencies after a period of scratching to relieve 'unpleasantness'. (Towards the end he admits evolution could make sex pleasurable, but most of the text refers to the necessity of the tension of unpleasure.) Psychoanalytically, sex allows the individual to "...reexperience the pleasure of intrauterine existence, the anxiety of birth, and the subsequent pleasure in surmounting this latter danger successfully." (page 49) Ferenczi then expands this symbolism so that it represents the catastrophe of the seas drying up. Then he continues to expand the psychoanalysis by specifying five catastrophes where the evolution of organic life aligns with sexual equivalents. (I'll spare you the table.) If that's not wild enough, Ferenczi occasionally throws in some Lamarckian analogies too.
Of course, it wouldn't be Freudian if the author didn't misunderstand or ignore female anatomy and experience. For example, Ferenczi theorizes that vaginas may have developed from cloaca and therefore have a 'cavity-eroticism'. Sex then creates a kind of 'anal distress' which he speculates "...may have led to pleasurable sensations in which the female was able to find a substitutive solace." (page 59) (Trust me, when it's good, it's NOT substitutive.)
Then there's a couple of random sexist bits that could use fact checking. Does the vagina really smell like herring brine because it emits trimethylamine? (page 57) (I've been in close proximity to several vaginas, but never encountered herring brine. Let me know if you have.) Last but not least, do the Samoyed women really stop menstruating during the dark winter months? I have a really hard time buying that one.
Only read if you like Freudian psychoanalysis and some weird analogies.
January 29, 2026
Gotta be the weirdest book I have read. So Ferenczi posited that geotrauma resulting from the transition from the sea to land during the late Devonian period was a significant traumatic event. He posited peregenesis parallel to Haeckel’s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” in the sense that not only does embryonic development replay its evolutionary ancestry, but the surrounding structural environment (uterus, amniotic fluid, etc.) follows the same pattern. Ferenczi believes that Lamarckian inheritance, which allows for the transmission of acquired characteristics and motive, is closer to the spirit of psychoanalysis than Darwinism. Every mammal, every land-dwelling vertebrate, basically carries this bit of traumatic memory in a libidinal sense. And coitus is just one attempt to return to the mother’s womb (which resembles our ancestors’ piscine habitat). This is also, if I’m correct, the first time I’ve seen evolutionary biology wind up in psychoanalysis, and I don’t think anyone did this before him. Of course, it’s blatantly wrong from a modern scientific perspective, but it does set a poetic undertone and he even names it “bioanalysis.”
July 4, 2023
Ferenczi delves into the notion of trauma and its effects on our sexuality. He emphasizes the importance of addressing and healing these wounds to reclaim our sexual authenticity. Ferenczi writes, "Unresolved trauma has the potential to hinder the development of healthy genitality. By acknowledging and integrating our past traumas, we can reclaim our sexual vitality and embrace our authentic selves." This idea resonates deeply, emphasizing the significance of emotional healing and self-acceptance in our sexual journeys.
This book assumes a certain level of familiarity with Freudian concepts, which was a bit overwhelming since I have an engineering background. But I am glad I have read books written by Freud, but remembering it time to time was the hard part to fully grasp the concepts mentioned in this book.
This book assumes a certain level of familiarity with Freudian concepts, which was a bit overwhelming since I have an engineering background. But I am glad I have read books written by Freud, but remembering it time to time was the hard part to fully grasp the concepts mentioned in this book.
August 21, 2025
Freuds strongest soldier arrives at dialectics to explain the mystery of life
February 25, 2022
I get it. It must've been quite interesting and influential during its time.
But it isn't anymore. If anything, this serves as an archetypal example of the worst ways of deriving theoretical conclusions from psychoanalysis (or importing conclusions from other fields into it).
But it isn't anymore. If anything, this serves as an archetypal example of the worst ways of deriving theoretical conclusions from psychoanalysis (or importing conclusions from other fields into it).
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