From Freud’s love of transference to an ethics of affectivity in Sándor Ferenczi

Com a autoria de Ana Fátima Aguiar & Marina F. R. Ribeiro, o artigo foi publicado no International Forum of Psychoanalysis em setembro de 2026.

Abstract

This article discusses the conception of love in the psychoanalytic clinic, from Freudian neutrality, representative of early psychoanalytic technique, to the shift toward what we call an “ethics of affectivity,” with the thought of Sándor Ferenczi as its central axis. Starting from Freudian warnings about transference and countertransference, we propose rethinking the analyst’s position beyond interpretation and abstinence. In Ferenczi, the analyst’s love emerges as an ethical attitude, marked by tact, empathy and emotional availability, capable of offering an environment of trust and recognition. Without departing from Freudian foundations, but seeking to overcome their impasses, Ferenczi maintains that the analyst’s implication does not compromise technique but deepens it. We argue that Ferenczi’s radical conception of love inaugurates a clinic situated in an intersubjective field, in which listening opens to the unsymbolized zones of trauma. Thus, the analyst’s love does not present itself as a deviation, but as a constitutive force of the analytic experience and a fundamental resource for transformations in analysis.

Key words: analyst’s love, ethics of affectivity, Sándor Ferenczi, transference, countertransference.

We can live close to another, and come to know him, without risk of hate, only if we love him (emphasis added). Any portion of love is of itself a degree of health, a lull in the madness. (Guimarães Rosa, 1963).

How can one speak of the analyst’s love without risking its reduction to an idealization or a romantic caricature? And how does one translate into words the form of love that manifests in listening, sustains silence, shelters the other’s helplessness, and endures not-knowing?

In the pages that follow, we will explore the unfolding of this conception of love in the fabric of the psychoanalytic field. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, the relationship between analyst and analysand has been reconfigured by successive theoretical revisions. If initially neutrality and abstinence dominated the clinical field as a form of “protection” for the work of transference, today we witness an important development: the analyst not only has the function of an interpreter of the unconscious, but they also show themselves to be available and implicated, someone who affects and is affected, and who, just like the analysand, is transformed by the analytic experience.

Our proposal is to (re)think the issue of abstinence, as well as the traditional dichotomy that venerates a certain verticalized asymmetry, often placing the analyst in a more defensive, interpretive, and impenetrable position. From this new horizon, we understand that the analyst’s love does not present itself as a deviation, but as an essential element for the process.

The origins of love in Freud: narcissism and transference love

As we have seen, this article aims to consider love as a bond, an important connection that sustains the link in the analytic relationship. The act of loving resides in the field of complexities and, as such, has interested psychoanalysis since the earliest days of psychoanalytic thought. Even though it was a thorny field and faced the resistances of its time, we know that Freudian psychoanalytic assumptions were already concerned with the affects circulating between analyst and analysand.

In “Recommendations to physicians practising psycho-analysis” (1958a,b), the Austrian psychoanalyst compares unconscious communication to telephone communication and considers it important and desirable for the analyst’s listening to operate in a manner that is truly receptive to the contents of their analysand. According to Freud (1958a,b), the analyst must place their unconscious in a receptive position toward the patient’s unconscious, functioning as an instrument capable of capturing and translating the unconscious communications that emerge in the analytic process. The analyst should not only listen to rationally and organized expressed words, but also remain sensitively open to what emerges from the patient’s unconscious.

The telephone metaphor helps clarify this idea: just as a receiver transforms invisible signals into audible sounds, so the analyst’s unconscious can capture subtle clues (slips, emotions, hesitations, spontaneous associations) and, from them, perceive the unconscious content underlying the patient’s speech. In other words, Freud suggests that the analyst should function as someone profoundly receptive, allowing their own unconscious to resonate with that of the analysand in order to understand meanings that do not appear directly in conscious discourse.

In the iconic “On narcissism: An introduction” (1914), Freud dedicates himself to thinking about love and inaugurates a discussion on the importance of being loved and developing the capacity to love, to move beyond oneself in order to love the other. Freudian theory dedicates itself to thinking of love as a form of libidinal investment. The author presents us with a work based on the conception of transference love (1915), through which psychoanalysis repositions the amorous phenomenon at the heart of the analytic experience. From an economic perspective, love can be understood as the result of a libidinal investment, the fruit of drive motions directed towards an object of desire.

This affect, often accompanied by anxiety and fantasy, emerges as an attempt to symbolize an originary loss. From the Oedipal drama, the subject is called upon to deal with the renunciation of the amorous possession of the parents, which imprints an inaugural wound that, throughout life, can manifest in the repetition of love bonds marked by ambivalence, in which one unconsciously seeks reparation for what was forbidden.

It is in this scenario that transference inscribes itself as a decisive moment in the analytic journey. When the alliance with the analyst has been consolidated and trust has been established, the analysand finds themselves in a position to relive infantile affective experiences. In this reencounter with the marks of the past, the analyst comes to occupy the place of symbolic recipient of old conflicts, now updated in the analytic relationship and potentially capable of transformation.

Freud thus identified that the analyst–analysand relationship becomes marked by a significant affective movement. The author (1961–1963) highlights that throughout the analytic work, even though there was an effort to “completely rationalize” the analyst–analysand situation, as if this relationship could be compared to a “simple arithmetic operation,” something emerges and infiltrates this dynamic. The author defines this element as new, unexpected, and multiform, and says: “We notice, then, that the patient, who should seek nothing more than a way out of the conflicts that cause them to suffer, develops a particular interest in the person of the physician” (1961–1963, p. 581).

Transference thus emerges as one of the great paradoxes of psychoanalytic technique. It is, at the same time, one of the main obstacles to the recollection of repressed material and one of the essential conditions for analytic treatment; it is a phenomenon that enables the analysand to relive in the analytic process their hidden affects and erotic impulses, but it can also act in a way that interrupts or harms it.

In this sense, Freud (1958a,b) recognizes that the management of transference represents one of the greatest difficulties for the analyst, but also highlights its clinical value when he affirms that transference makes actual “the hidden and forgotten loveimpulses of patients,” since “no one can be slain in absentia or in effigie” (p. 146). Although transferential traces are present in all human relationships, it is in the specific bond of analysis that family representations are relived and repressed affects find a new form of investment in the figure of the analyst.

However, it is necessary to consider the risks involved in managing this complex dynamic. When the analytic relationship follows hierarchical patterns, the analysand may experience the analyst as someone distant, almost unattainable, situated in a psychic territory separated by boundaries that hinder welcoming. If the analyst’s image acquires contours of austerity and unquestionable authority, this can crystallize fantasies of power and submission and feed resistances. In this position, the analyst risks intensifying the transference neurosis, promoting the closure of the analytic space rather than favoring its opening.

In “The dynamics of transference” (1958a,b), Freud presents two forms of instinctual investment: that which is conscious and allocated in relationships, as well as that which is unconscious and related to repressed aspects, which, even if not available to consciousness, are actualized in our choices and in the relationships we live with ourselves and the world.

There is a Freudian psychoanalytic verticality, which points to the understanding that the analyst must shield themselves from their own affectivity in order to remain neutral, in the position of one who, based on the fundamental rule of analysis, remains free from any personal interference so as to be able to listen to the analysand’s free associations, and to exercise the task of free-floating attention, so that the unconscious can be heard and deciphered. However, the context of analysis implies a relationship between two people, two unconsciouses. In this process, analyst and analysand present themselves and surrender to that shared space, each with their own histories and feelings.

Freudian theory thus comes to recognize transference as an important vehicle of unconscious communication, precisely because of the complexity and ambivalence it arouses. It understands transference neurosis as a phenomenon that demands attention and management, since intense affects are relived in the relationship with the analyst. In light of this, it becomes essential to reflect on the figure of the analyst. Their listening, their posture, and their own subjectivity are continuously implicated in the process: the way they welcome what is said and what is silenced, how they deal with impasses and recognize resistances, both the analysand’s and their own, reveals not just a technique but an ethical positioning. These impasses are not external; they traverse their own training, their personal analysis, and the theoretical choices that guide their clinical work.

Some fundamental questions thus arise: to what extent do the values inherited from classical psychoanalysis (dis)favor the analyst’s role in constructing their loving capacity to welcome their analysand? Are they living supports for listening, or at times rigid molds that limit the encounter? At what points do these references contribute to the experience of care, and to what extent can they become obstacles to the creation of a truly welcoming and transformative psychic space? How can one preserve the rigor of tradition without compromising the vitality of the analytic experience?

It is evident that all these questions are raised with the freshness of contemporary reflections and discussions on the relevance of psychoanalytic theory, especially in the face of the demands of suffering we encounter in our times. However, we might suppose that they stem from a discomfort already evident in the early days, for Freud’s fear regarding the difficulties imposed by transferential phenomena can be observed in several moments of his work. In “Observations on transference-love” (1915), he makes this point explicit when he states that, even though every beginning analyst is frightened by the vicissitudes related to the interpretation of associations and the reproduction of the repressed, “he soon reaches the point of attaching little importance to these difficulties and of convincing himself that the only truly serious ones lie in the management of transference” (p. 211).

Thus, transference love comes to present itself as a point of extreme relevance in the construction of psychoanalytic thought. Freud argues that, precisely because of its clinical pertinence, it should be neither satisfied nor repressed by the analyst. According to the author:

the gratification of the patient’s love is as fatal for the analysis as its suppression. The analyst’s path lies in another direction, for which there is no model in real life. He must take care not to steer away from the lovetransference, not to repulse it or to make it distasteful to the patient; but he must just as resolutely withhold any response to it. (Freud, 1915, p. 227, emphasis added)

It is based on this technical and ethical principle regarding the analyst’s stance towards transference love that Freud reinforces the issue of neutrality as a form of controlling countertransference. But what to do when countertransferential responses stubbornly erupt? How did Freud position himself regarding the analyst’s flaws and limitations in the face of the desired control of affects, via neutrality?

At this point, the celebrated case of Anna O. becomes a paradigmatic reference. The impasse experienced by Breuer, faced with the patient’s amorous transference and the inevitable reverberation it caused in him, led him to retreat, abruptly ending the treatment. According to records by Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer (1975), the abrupt interruption of Anna O.’s treatment precipitated a severe crisis for her. Could we suppose that the prematurity of analytic technique in the face of transferential demands at the time resulted in rigidity, fear, and refusal in the face of the countertransferential responses experienced by Breuer?

Perhaps the outcome would have been different if Breuer, instead of the radicality of neutrality, had sustained a more porous listening space, not in the sense of yielding to or reciprocating the love transferred onto him, but of containing, recognizing, naming, and managing the affects that emerged from that encounter, in the complexity it naturally arouses; if, instead of breaking off, he had welcomed the transferential experience as a path for mutual transformation, allowing himself to be affected without displacing himself from the analytic function. Given that Freud himself already stated that the management of countertransference constitutes a sine qua non condition for achieving the goals of an analysis, we suppose that the analytic traversal of such a loving bond, however intense and disruptive, could have been symbolized and taken on new contours.

As analysts, we are evoked by the encounter with our analysands, called to share with them a theatrical play whose plot is drawn by the transferential dynamic, and we are invited to play various roles (Ferro & Basile, 2013). However, Breuer was frightened by the role that Anna O. made him play in her “private theater” and ended up plunging into his own, unable to recognize it, let alone metabolize and interpret the unconscious elements shared by the pair. According to Minerbo (2020), the issue “is not countertransference itself, but the possibility of not recognizing it, which would give free rein to its unconscious effects” (p. 59). ]1]

This hypothesis aims to position clinical listening based on an ethics of hospitality, a form of analytic presence that opens itself to the work of being traversed by the other, which includes transference love, as well as negative transference. Thus, revisiting the case of Anna O. in light of what we propose here as an ethos of love, what emerges is the image of an interrupted treatment, an analysand helpless in her suffering, and the figure of an analyst who needed to defend himself against love – both his analysand’s and his own.

In this way, the impossibility of receiving such affects obstructed porosity and interrupted listening, preventing Breuer’s affective availability towards Anna O. There was no management of countertransference, no containment for the analysand’s internal world, or space for love to be the origin of the analytic work, rather than a disruptive and traumatic end as staged in this emblematic clinical case in the history of psychoanalysis.

Although the original outcome was the end of Anna O.’s analysis and countertransference love represented a milestone in the “recommendation” for maintaining the analyst’s abstinence, the word “love” also appears in Freud’s work in its broader understanding, which contemplates the sense we are focusing on in this article. In “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego” (1921), while presenting the concept of libido, Freud explicates an extensive reflection on the meaning of the word “love.” The author significantly broadens the notion of love by conceiving it as an expression of libido in a comprehensive sense. In other words, love, in Freud, no longer designates merely a restricted erotic experience but comes to name a psychic binding force that organizes subjective and relational investments:

The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists (and this is what is commonly called love, and what the poets sing of) in sexual love with sexual union as its aim. But we do not separate from this—what in any case has a share in the name ‘love’—on the one hand, selflove, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. (Freud, 1921, p. 37, emphasis added)

And in this same fragment, Freud adds that: “Therefore the word ‘love’ in the widest sense, as used by us, is justified. We are not the first, nor the only ones, to use it in this sense” (Freud, 1921, pp. 37–38). We see, therefore, that all sorts of elements involving psychoanalytic theory are linked to love in its broadest form (and vice versa). Instead of conceptually restricting love, Freud legitimates the use of the term itself in its polysemy, recognizing that common language already captures something essential of its multiplicity.

Thus, psychoanalysis would not need to replace the word “love,” but rather to theoretically deepen its different destinies. And in this sense, still reflecting on the nature of love, Freud proposes a surprising equivalence: the eros described by Plato, in its origin, purpose, and relation to sexual desire, corresponds, point by point, to what psychoanalysis names as libido – the energy of the loving impulses. This identification, far from being mere speculation, had already been meticulously sustained by authors such as Nachmansohn and Pfister, who demonstrated how much the psychoanalytic concept of libido aligns with the ontological and relational dimension of Platonic eros.

Similarly, Freud observes that the praise of love made by the apostle Paul in his famous letter to the Corinthians also points to this expanded sense of love, which surpasses genital eroticism and encompasses care, patience, giving, and the bond with the other in their entirety.

However, in the psychoanalytic tradition, these loving impulses are called sexual instincts. This naming, however, deeply troubled many. Those who saw in sexuality something undesirable or shameful reacted to Freud’s proposal by accusing it of pansexualism, as if recognizing the loving force in its drive root were a form of reductionism or perversion.

Freud, however, refuses to soften the terms. He could, he admits, have adopted from the beginning more noble and acceptable expressions like “eros” or “eroticism” and thus avoided some of the resistance he faced. But he preferred to maintain the uncomfortable term “sexuality,” because he believed that yielding in words paves the way for deeper concessions, to the point where one also yields in the original substance. What Freud proposes, with disconcerting frankness, is that we do not need (and should not) soften the language to make it acceptable [2]. Freud (1921) argues that the preference for terms such as Eros or eroticism in place of sexuality expresses, to a large extent, the cultural discomfort with the sexual dimension of human existence. Although he recognizes that such expressions could make his formulations more easily acceptable, he chooses not to resort to this artifice, considering that the softening of language represents a concession that, little by little, may compromise the precision of thought itself. From this perspective, terminological substitution does not modify the content of the concept, since Eros is nothing other than the Greek equivalent of the German word Liebe, which means love.

Extending this reflection, Freud suggests that affective bonds, or love relations, are not restricted to the interpersonal field but are also at the base of collective life. This social cohesion, Freud argues, is not explained only by mechanisms of identification or psychic contagion. According to the author (1921), “it is evident that the group is held together by a power of some kind. To what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, who holds together everything in the world?” (p. 38).

We see, therefore, that the conception of love has always orbited as a latent presence, as a territory of conflict and ambivalence, as well as a binding force: the “powerful” eros, which operates both in intimate bonds and in broader social ties, and which naturally leads us to the philosophical source of the term, in Plato, who describes it as a daimon, an intermediary between the divine and the human, between desire and knowledge.

Freud knew that transference love could be the engine of the analytic process, provided it was managed with discernment, since this would be a love linked to sexuality and one that, according to the author, distances itself from “genuine” love. In his conception, however, the analyst should maintain abstinence, always attentive to the risk that the analysand’s love might awaken something that escaped the analytic function. He warned that the analyst should not yield to the “deviation of the technical method,” for to love, in the manner of erotic countertransference, would be to lose the clinical compass. Still, he said that this love should not be dissipated, but preserved for when, after the treatment, the demands of real life made themselves felt (Freud, 1915, p. 170).

There was both Freud’s evident concern that the loving experience lived in the analytic space could cause an overflow (or an annihilation) of the frame, and a recognition that such love should not be retaliated against by the analyst, as if transference love were also a seed that could germinate in the future.

The notion of love mixes and unfolds, especially in relation to the phenomenon of transference, through which the patient’s loving and hostile affects are directed towards the analyst, with whom they relive infantile and unconscious bonds. In the final lines of his text “Observations on transference-love,” Freud (1915) recognizes that, although “explosive,” these affects not only arise but structure the possibility of analysis – which he illustrates with the memorable analogy:

The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist. But when has a chemist ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances which are indispensable, on account of their effects? It is remarkable that psycho-analysis has to win for itself once more all the liberties which have long been granted to other medical activities. I am certainly not in favour of giving up harmless methods of treatment. … But it is grossly to underestimate the psychoneuroses, both as to their origin and their practical importance, to suppose that these disorders are to be overcome by such small and inoffensive means. No; in medical practice there will always be room for the ferrum and the ignis side by side with the medicina; and in just the same way we shall never be able to do without a strictly regular, undiluted psycho-analysis which is not afraid to handle the most dangerous mental impulses and to obtain mastery over them for the benefit of the patient. (Freud, 1915, p. 171)

Our proposition is that Freud already intuited and moved forward with his formulations, albeit cautiously, in the direction of understanding that an analyst never occupies a position outside the affective field of analysis. His concern does not seem to us to indicate an attempt to eliminate the emotional intensity of the encounter, but rather to prevent it from being enacted or managed in an unreflective way. The analyst is called to deal with this loving demand without retreating, retaliating, or surrendering to it, sustaining the tension between affective presence and technical abstinence.

If as early as 1915 transference already revealed itself as “ferrum et ignis,”[3] Freud came to recognize the necessity that, when faced with such “dangerous impulses,” a psychoanalyst dedicated to the art of “refining” theory and technique should not be intimidated nor wish to “dilute” the risks with which they find themselves implicated.

The analyst’s letting themself be affected is present in Freudian thought and is explicitly declared in the above citation. By following the assumptions of the psychoanalyst founder of our dear discipline, it is essential that we continue to build this accurate, lived, and prophesied psychoanalysis by Freud, which adheres to the heat of ignis and the explosive character that presents itself. We consider that this is our movement when we propose that the analyst’s love offers itself as a driving force (Freud, 1915, p. 171), a generating potency of such porosity that it allows affectations to lodge themselves and, therefore, favor “letting oneself be inhabited,” without the fear of “handling the most dangerous mental impulses and obtaining mastery over them for the benefit of the patient (p. 171)”.

When we revisit the text “The future prospects of psycho-analytic therapy” (1910), we observe that Freud introduces the term countertransference in a tone of warning to the physicians who practiced psychoanalysis. The author describes it as something that “arises in [the physician] as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings,” thus recognizing that the analytic experience inevitably mobilizes the analyst’s own psychic life. Even so, Freud states that he is “almost” inclined to recommend that the physician recognize and master this countertransference “in himself” (Freud, 1910, p. 144), an orientation that suggests a cautious rather than a resolute position.

It is thus well known that transference and countertransference presented themselves, in the early days of psychoanalytic clinical practice, as critical points capable of threatening the treatment and the continuity of the analytic process. However, we can also perceive, throughout Freud’s writings, a special care for a discipline that was not only being founded, but also being substantiated before an entire medical society. There was not yet sufficient clinical experience to delimit the status of these new and challenging elements of the analytic situation, initially perceived as potential sources of technical disturbance.

Freud’s very formulation hints at this prudence, for when he affirms that “no psycho-analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit” (p. 145), the author shifts the problem of countertransference from a technical limitation to a dimension linked to the analyst’s formation and psychic work, which is why he insists on the need for continuous self-analysis (Freud, 1910, p. 145). Here, there is a zealous movement by the founder of psychoanalysis toward his creation, attempting to protect it from possible deviations, while at the same time we also observe a certain intuition, still embryonic, that such events which, on that occasion, seemed harmful – despite being truly complex – also pointed to the fact that their good or bad use would be related to the analyst’s capacity to deal with such affections, and that their management depended less on their elimination than on the analyst’s ability to endure, recognize, and work through them.

Likewise, when indicating that “psycho-analytic technique must undergo certain modifications according to the nature of the disease and the predominant instincts in the patient” (Freud, 1910, p. 146), Freud seems to anticipate, albeit incipiently, the conception of greater clinical flexibility, pointing to the need for an analyst who is attentive and receptive to the particularities of the analysand, capable of adjusting their listening and intervention to the singular demands of the analytic encounter. Is there not already insinuated here (however vaguely and cautiously) an openness to that which Ferenczi would later radicalize when formulating the elasticity of technique and conferring centrality to the empathic dimension of the analytic experience?

Hypothetical analogies aside, it seems to us that psychoanalytic theory and technique are constituted along their own path. Freud, grappling with impasses that arose and needed time and dedication to be better observed and defined, positioned himself with caution and ethical rigor, in defense of the psychoanalytic movement that had already evolved so much. At the same time, it also seems clear to us that there is a pointing towards possible and necessary modifications and expansions, in an openness to the future, based on new experiences and investigations.

Although Freud early recognized the centrality of affects in the analytic experience, his technical formulation remains traversed by a constitutive tension: at the same time that he admits the inevitability of transference love, he insists on the need to contain it under the sign of abstinence and technical reserve. Such a paradox seems to reveal a crucial point of the nascent clinic: the fear that the analyst’s affective implication might threaten the specificity of the method. Our hypothesis, however, is that this Freudian precaution, even if necessary, in its inaugural context, leaves open a decisive question for the contemporary clinic: how can the analytic bond operate profound transformations without the analyst also participating, in an affectively implicated manner, in the encounter?

It is precisely from this impasse that Ferenczi becomes an author who marks a fundamental turning point. Far from proposing a rupture with Freud, his contribution can be understood as a clinical radicalization of problems already inscribed in Freudian theory. It is certain that there is a leap between the Freudian dilemma of countertransference and the understanding of the role of the analyst’s love in contemporary psychoanalytic clinic. Therefore, the investigative work to which we dedicate ourselves in this article is launched, precisely, to discuss the conception of the analyst’s love in Sándor Ferenczi as the foundation of an ethics of affectivity in the psychoanalytic clinic.

The analyst’s love in the thought of Sándor Ferenczi

It would not be incoherent or exaggerated to say that Ferenczi’s ideas are among the most unsettling within the psychoanalytic theoretical-clinical framework, as well as among the most current. His clinical style is marked by sensitive listening and an ethical commitment to the analysand’s suffering, and it opens paths for profound reflections on the role of love in the psychoanalytic clinic.

As a disciple and personal friend of Freud for years, the clinical practice of the Hungarian physician and psychoanalyst was notoriously dedicated to patients who did not respond to the classical method and, for this reason, other analysts considered them “unanalyzable” (Dupont, 1990). But the lenses through which Ferenczi saw this reality were different: he considered that, in such “difficult cases,” the difficulty resided in the analyst, not in the analysands (Dupont, 1990; Kupermann, 2008).

Armed with Ferenczi’s contributions and other psychoanalysts who also used the same lenses, we can see there were difficult barriers that seemed insurmountable to the molds of the Freudian method; it was difficult to break paradigms – at the cost of remaining excluded from the psychoanalytic milieu for decades, [4] as happened to Ferenczi for his audacity in creating a new way of dealing with suffering that was not expressed in free association, that did not manifest through dreams.

Mortified, devitalized patients, marked by early traumas, therefore seemed inaccessible to psychoanalytic treatment until Sándor Ferenczi perceived that it was the analyst who was primarily responsible for creating this access, it was he who had to create the bridge to reach them. As highlighted by Moreno and Coelho (2012), Ferenczi’s theoretical elaboration arises from eminently clinical interrogations and from a rigorous attention to the manifestations that emerge in the analytic scene.

When confronted with patients incapable of associating freely or of elaborating from libidinal frustration, Ferenczi begins to investigate more radically the analyst’s implication in the analytic process. Along this path, he criticizes the excessively distant and affectively non-implicated posture of certain analysts, naming it “professional hypocrisy” (Moreno & Coelho, 2012, p. 708), because he understands that such an attitude could repeat, in the setting, aspects of the infantile environment that contributed to the psychic illness.

Ferenczi starts from a restlessness: Why do certain analyses fail even when conducted by experienced analysts and with patients who seem collaborative? This question leads him to investigate the silent zones of the clinic, that which is communicated without being said, the unsymbolized layers of trauma.

In his celebrated text “Confusion of tongues between adults and the child” (1994d), Ferenczi proposes that psychic suffering often originates in early traumas in which the child found themselves subjected to a violence which, because it was linked and acted upon by the power exercised by adults, they, in their fragility and innocence, could not escape. This was a violence often disguised as protection, but marked by an excess of stimulation or by lack, which involves fear, helplessness, and anguish. This, according to Ferenczi, would be the first time of trauma.

But it is at another moment, when the child tries to communicate, or even comprehend, the traumatic experience, that the trauma can, in fact, become consolidated in their psyche, when, instead of a welcoming, the child finds a denial of what they experienced in the initial phase of the trauma. Ferenczi called this attitude disavowal, a concept in which the author emphasizes that the worst in the adult’s attitude towards the traumatized child “is really the denial [Verleugnung], the affirmation that nothing happened, that there was no suffering” (Ferenczi, 1994c, p. 79).

What configures, therefore, the traumatic inscription in the psyche is the negligent and violent action of disavowal, that is, the rupture of trust and non-recognition. According to the author, the analyst needs to be attentive to their posture in the face of the analysand’s suffering so as not to act like the adult who disavows:

The contrast to the traumatic milieu, therefore, mutual sympathy and trust, must be demonstrated before one can risk allowing a new kind of reaction: recollection instead of repetition. Free association alone, without laying new foundations for an atmosphere of confidence, does not bring about a real cure. The analyst must truly and with all his heart devote himself to the case, or, if he is not prepared to do so, he must admit this fact honestly, in contrast to the behavior of adults toward children. (Ferenczi, 1988, p. 214)

Even though the theme of traumatic experiences is not the focus of this article, such contributions by Sándor Ferenczi on trauma and disavowal become crucial for us to understand the issue of the analyst’s love. This is because Ferenczi becomes a precursor in regard to the conception that the analyst’s abstinence and neutrality can act as a gesture of disavowal and thus be retraumatizing. This ethical aspect guides Ferenczian thought, guiding the Hungarian psychoanalyst to think about the role of the analyst’s affects in the relationship with their analysand.

We see, therefore, that the “confusion of tongues” expresses the complexity of the encounter between an adult and a child and, analogously, between the analyst and their analysand. Ferenczi deduces that cure can only occur if, in analysis, the analysand finds another capable of listening to their suffering, who can bear witness and welcome what is said and what could not be configured as a language: the unsymbolized. In this sense, the analytic encounter gives way to the non-representable, that which does not present itself via free association, for it lies before the area of repression.

It is at this point that the importance of the analyst’s love emerges, as an ethical attitude that is made through care, emotional availability, and courage to bear the impact of alterity. This love, therefore, also implies a form of suffering. In dialogue with the Ferenczian tradition, Borgogno (2004a) reinforces the radicality of Ferenczi in relation to Freudian theory, emphasizing that the elaboration of trauma depends on its actualization in the analytic bond, so that catastrophic experiences of the past may reappear and be traversed under new psychic conditions.

For this, the analyst cannot occupy a position of technical distance or excessive neutrality; on the contrary, a sufficiently conscious and integral involvement becomes necessary, in which their emotional and bodily presence participates in the process. As the author points out, the analyst is summoned to “go through the trauma in an increasingly conscious way” and, so to speak, “with soul and body” (p. 730). [5]

From this perspective, the pain reedited in the transference should not be interrupted or prematurely neutralized. It is the analyst’s task to sustain, with imaginative availability and affective responsiveness, the different subjective positions mobilized in the analysand’s psychic drama, offering conditions so that traumatic experiences may finally acquire representation and shared inscription. Only after this trajectory, according to Borgogno (2004a), can the analysand begin to recognize, name, and appropriate their own history, transforming into symbolizable experience that which previously remained reiterated in the form of catastrophic suffering.

Borgogno (2004b) emphasizes that Ferenczi inaugurates a psychoanalysis that is anchored in affective experience, and thus shifts the center of analytic work from the domain of abstinent neutrality. His horizon was different: to create conditions so that affects could be traversed, felt, and transformed. Along this path, feelings and thoughts do not appear as opposing forces, but as dimensions that need to find a singular measure of encounter. The author points out that the Ferenczian notion of tact designates this delicate art of approach, made of sensitivity, ethics, and alive listening.

Analysis is thus constituted in a field of shared experience, in which the analyst is not a mere observer and decipherer of the repressed unconscious, but someone who makes themselves available to affect and be affected.

It is important to clarify that mutual affectation does not annul the asymmetry of the relationship. On the contrary, it is precisely the recognition of this asymmetry and the responsibility it imposes that allows for the emergence of an ethics of the analyst’s implication. According to Coelho (2004, p. 83), by proposing that the analyst’s and patient’s feelings and ideas can intertwine in the analytic process, Ferenczi’s work expands the ethical horizon of psychoanalysis, to the extent that it recognizes the patient not as a mere projection or representation of the analyst’s ego, but as a real other, with whom it is possible to establish identification and a relationship founded on the recognition of their alterity.

In his article “On the technique of psycho-analysis” (1994a), Ferenczi points to the vicissitudes of the analyst’s openness to the affectations of the encounter with the analysand, stating that

this perpetual oscillation between free play of the imagination and critical scrutiny demands of the analyst what is demanded in no other kind of therapy: a freedom and mobility of psychic investment such as is known otherwise only in the play of phantasy. (Ferenczi, 1994b, p. 99)

With the theoretical-clinical expansion courageously proposed by Ferenczi, we can glimpse the germ of intersubjectivity in the psychoanalytic clinic (Aguiar, 2025), which becomes clear when we find, in his Clinical Diary (1988) a passage in which the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis emphasizes that “It is as if two halves of the soul were completing each other to form a unity. The analyst’s feelings interlace with the analysand’s ideas, and the analyst’s ideas (representation images) with the analysand’s feelings” (p. 45) – an affective intertwining that does not annul conflicts but allows representations and emotions to be shared and symbolized in the analyst–analysand encounter.

Ferenczi’s critique of analytic neutrality and abstinence is linked to the creation of an environment of trust that favors the re-edition of childhood experiences marked by pain and abandonment. Upon realizing that certain clinical impasses could not be explained solely by the analysand’s resistance, the author began to emphasize the need for a critical examination of the analyst’s own attitudes and feelings. From this movement emerges the concept of tact, understood as the capacity to sensitively assess the timing, form, and effects of each intervention, including when to interpret, communicate something to the analysand, or wait for new associations. In summary, Ferenczi defines tact as the faculty of “feeling with” (Einfühlung) (Ferenczi, 1988, p. 31).

In developing his notion of tact, Ferenczi describes a clinical capacity that goes beyond the mere technical application of rules. It is a matter of discerning, in each analytic situation, the timing of the intervention, the value of silence, the form of communication, and the way of responding to the patient’s reactions. This competence, for the author, is founded on the faculty of “feeling with,” that is, an empathic openness capable of guiding the analyst within the singularity of each encounter.

Ferenczi emphasizes that tact is the fruit “of a perpetual oscillation between ‘feeling with,’ self-observation and judgment activity” (1928/2011, p. 38). Therefore, the exercise of tact and the experience of empathy demand care and sensitivity from the analyst. And it is only through this implication and ethics that it becomes possible to offer oneself to the analysand as a “new presence, that makes their muted voice speak and experience, for the first time, the experience of being truly heard” (Tucci, 2020, p. 127).

Such analytic listening, one sustained by empathic sensitivity and psychological tact, was translated by Sándor Ferenczi’s analysands as “kindness.” This understanding is not refuted by the author; on the contrary, he affirms:

There is no difference in nature between the tact demanded of us and the moral demand not to do to others what, in analogous circumstances, we would not want others to do to us. I hasten to add at once that the capacity for exercising this kind of ‘kindness’ signifies only one aspect of analytic understanding. … Knowledge enables us, with full cognizance of the circumstances, to regard the most unpleasant person in the world as a patient in need of healing and, as such, not to be denied our sympathy. (Ferenczi, 1994b, p. 95, emphasis added)

By bringing tact and kindness closer together, Ferenczi shifts technique toward an explicitly ethical horizon. His proposal does not consist of a naive benevolence, but rather of the recognition that the analytic attitude implies a form of consideration for the suffering of the other. The capacity to sustain this position depends both on technical knowledge and on the availability to recognize the analysand as someone real, and not merely as a support for transferential projections.

In this way, the author recognizes the analyst’s care as a form of kindness, and emphasizes that this does not exhaust the complexity of analytic listening. Recovering Ferenczi’s writings in this same article and, even if implicitly, throughout his work, we see that the analyst’s posture implies a set of skills, among them empathy, kindness, sympathy, humility, and compassion.

A scholar of Ferenczian thought, the psychoanalyst and researcher Gustavo Dean-Gomes (2022) observes that Ferenczi articulates empathy, kindness, and tact to sustain the idea that the analyst, more than empathetic, must be sympathetic with the patient. In order to deepen this understanding, the author proposes a careful distinction about the meaning of each of these terms. According to DeanGomes (2022, pp. 115–116), the most precise translation for the German term Einfühlen is not “feeling with,” but “feeling into,” since the prefix “ein-,” in the German language, expresses a movement directed towards the interior, as occurs with the prefix “in-” in English. Thus, Einfühlen does not refer to the idea of something shared, as “feeling with” suggests, but rather to the idea of something that is inspected or observed internally.

The expression “feeling with” would fit better with the concept of sympathy, since the Greek prefix “syn- “ carries the notion of joining or reuniting. In contrast, the word compassion comes from the Latin compassionis, which is, in turn, a translation of the Greek sympatheia (compassion = com + passionis, sympathy = sym + patheia), both indicating a common or shared feeling. The relation that Ferenczi establishes between sympathy and a humility that goes beyond the Christian tradition reinforces this terminological distinction, which, according to the author, assumes an ethical character. Furthermore, DeanGomes emphasizes that the “feeling with,” cited previously, originally refers to the concept of Gefühlseinstellung (which can be translated as “emotional attitude”), and not to the cognitive aspect of Einfühlung (Dean-Gomes (2022, pp. 115–116).

By observing such definitions, what we can perceive is an intertwining, which justifies that all of them – empathy, sympathy, kindness, humility, and compassion – are implicated in the analyst’s posture in the clinic lived and theorized by Sándor Ferenczi. In this perspective, the analyst’s love does not represent, in any way, the dissolution of technical limits, but rather a quality of presence that recognizes the other in their singularity.

In light of his clinical experience, Ferenczi offers psychoanalysis a subtle, yet decisive, displacement: analysis ceases to be a method centered on interpretation and comes to configure also a relational experience that is guided by an ethics that welcomes alterity and listens to suffering. Therefore, beyond what was initially thought by Freud, in this experience, love does not configure exclusively the bond with the unconscious memories of primordial love conflicts; it goes beyond an affect to be interpreted, which denotes a challenge for the psychoanalyst and for the analytic work.

Ferenczi proposed, finally, the radical idea of mutual analysis. Although he later discarded this technique, the attempt expresses the requirement of symmetrization in the analytic relationship. By recognizing their own defenses, affects, and errors, the analyst could cease occupying the place of the abusive adult and become, in fact, someone to trust. The conviction, on the part of the patient, that their suffering is recognized, constitutes itself as a condition for the trauma not to be repeated and for the analytic process to operate a transformation.

By defending the importance of the analyst’s sincerity, Ferenczi breaks with a technical ideal that absolutizes neutrality and affectively annuls the person of the analyst. Ferenczi’s clinical practice shows that the analyst’s sensitivity does not compromise technique but deepens it. The analyst’s sensitive presence would act as a restorative potency, favoring a “cure by relationship” (Tucci, 2020).

For Freud and many of his contemporaries (and, certainly, let’s agree, also ours!), this kind of approach will seem risky or even dangerous. However, Ferenczi knew that the greater risk lay precisely in the maintenance of a technique that, so many times, could be (re)traumatizing. Therefore, he sought to follow – with audacity, yes – but he also followed paths permeated by hard and sensitive work, in equal measure, which involved experimentation and prudence. The control of countertransference recommended by Freud is not discarded or ignored; however, the Hungarian psychoanalyst understands that to control means that the analyst should “keep themselves constantly in contact with all sorts of affects and thoughts that occur to them while they are with their patients” (Kahatuni & Sanches, 2009, p. 106).

It becomes evident that, contrary to a psychoanalysis that privileges technical and interpretive knowledge, Ferenczi proposes a clinic that advocates affectations, giving a prominent place to elements such as trust and reciprocity for the good progress of the analytic process. For that, the analyst needs to be implicated in the process, not shying away from the effects of this openness and affective surrender. His thought radicalizes the Freudian notion of listening to the repressed unconscious and introduces what we could call an “ethics of affectivity.”

Ferenczi insists that the analytic posture demands a particular form of humility: the recognition that psychic transformation does not derive exclusively from interpretation, but also from the analyst’s capacity to genuinely implicate themselves in the bond. In this sense, any artificial or excessively technical attitude tends to be quickly perceived by the patient, compromising the trust necessary for the analytic work (Ferenczi, 1994b, p. 32).

Thus, we see that love in the Ferenczian clinic comes to have a place, a function, and an effect. It creates a porosity for the free transit of affects, as well as the sustenance for conflicts and ambivalences, a love that enables witnessing, fundamental for the trauma to be symbolized; that acts as a driving force, generates trust, and therefore has a constituent value for subjectivity.

Kahatuni and Sanches (2009), authors who dedicated themselves to creating the acclaimed Dictionary of the thought of Sándor Ferenczi, who when presenting the entry “love,” highlight that, for Ferenczi, the perspective of the analyst’s affectivity gains strength in “Confusion of tongues between adults and the child” (1994d), in which he reaffirms the importance of direct emotional contact with traumatized patients, especially with those infantile and split-off parts of their personality. According to the authors:

Ferenczi was concerned … with an effective capacity to love the patients, with a true affective availability, with a possibility of entering the world of the other feeling their joys and pleasures, but also their torments, anguishes, and despairs, without, however, needing to resort to theory as a protective shield, and still, without getting lost in the other. [6] (Kahatuni & Sanches, 2009, p. 34, emphasis added)

The authors point out that, for Ferenczi, this love is responsible for creating a listening that is not intimidated in the face of the other’s movements of pain and pleasure; on the contrary, it commits to them, without resorting to theory as a shield and without getting lost in the relationship. It is a form of love that recognizes the patient’s times, their pauses and advances, allowing them to grow according to their internal possibilities. The therapeutic function of love, based on Ferenczi’s work, acts as a kind of vital protection that strengthens the capacity to face disturbing experiences, without harming psychic integrity.

Kahtuni and Sanches observe that, although the theme of love is present in several texts by Ferenczi, it is in his Clinical Diary that his deepest reflections on the subject are concentrated. In an entry from January 1932, for example, Ferenczi describes the restorative effect of love on a shattered psyche: affect, when purified of ambivalence, functions as an agglutinating substance that allows the reunification of the personality. Love not only protects, it also repairs, functioning as a kind of “glue” that can reunite the fragments of an ego shattered by traumatic experiences (Kahatuni & Sanches, 2009, p. 35).

The authors mention another annotation, from March of the same year, in which Ferenczi affirms that the act of welcoming the analysand, even in the face of their most bizarre or infantile manifestations, is a decisive therapeutic factor. They also emphasize that Ferenczi considers that the analyst who demonstrates sincere compassion and abstains from judgments allows the analysand to feel understood in their humanity and thus offers an experience of hope in a world that has so often been hostile to them. For Ferenczi, love and mutual understanding are the true agents of cure (Kahtuni & Sanches, 2009, p. 35).

We see that Ferenczi’s greatest legacy is perhaps the clarity that the analyst needs to reach human suffering and be affected by it, in all its complexity. And in this sense, what we intend to defend is that one can only bear (in the original sense of the word – to give support – and also in what refers to “enduring”), if we have the capacity to love. When Ferenczi says that he must “underline once more that only a true position of ‘feeling with’ can help us” (p. 95), we understand that the faculty of “being with” can only be practiced through love. The “feeling with” referred to in the citation concerns a loving attitude, an affective disposition that involves the analyst in an ethical listening, capable of welcoming, sustaining, and, perhaps, healing.

Sándor Ferenczi points to what we understand as an ethos of love, whose essence had already been described by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians – referred to by Freud, as we saw previously, and here reinforced by Ferenczi: a patient and kind love, that does not mistreat, that rejoices in the truth. That bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This radical conception of love that we find in Ferenczian thought echoes in contemporary contributions that seek to broaden the analytic reach.

The Hungarian psychoanalyst opened doors to a psychoanalysis that instrumentalizes itself through love, through the analyst’s affective implication, which recognizes the value of the analyst’s unconscious for the analytic process. Love in Ferenczi represents an ethical and technical disposition that redefines the analyst’s position and the very sense of cure. In times of growing technicism and immediatism in psychoanalytic practice, his work remains as an invitation to loving listening and the analyst’s courageous presence, in the task of sustaining the fragility and potency that inhabit each session of analysis.

Final weavings

We sought, with this article, to trace a kind of “cartography of love,” from Freud to Ferenczi, and at the end of this journey, we understand that Ferenczian clinical thought inaugurates a fundamental displacement in psychoanalysis, a movement in which the analyst’s love has a primordial function for the analytic work: what we called an ethics of affectivity. Different from classical neutrality, Ferenczi proposes a sensitive listening, marked by the analyst’s affective implication as a condition for access to early and unsymbolized traumas.

The analyst’s love, in its emotional availability and capacity for “feeling with,” distances itself radically from the inaugural proposal in psychoanalytic thought of a neutrality, for it locates itself in the field of intersubjectivity – which represents not a technical rupture, but an ethical amplification of clinical practice. The posture proposed by Ferenczi demands from the analyst, theoretical knowledge and interpretation, but beyond that, it also demands tact, compassion, and openness to let oneself be affected and sustain the analysand’s alterity.

Therefore, the contribution we seek to sustain in this article consists of understanding the path from Freudian transferential love to the Ferenczian ethics of affectivity not as a mere chronological evolution of technique, but as an epistemological transformation of the very conception of the analytic encounter. It is important to emphasize, once again, that the love to which this work refers does not correspond to a benevolent, fusional, or sentimentalist attitude on the part of the analyst in the face of the patient’s suffering. Nor is it a matter of erasing the asymmetry inherent to the analytic situation, dissolving clinical boundaries, or replacing the work of elaboration.

Our aim here has been to outline, from the most subtle movements already present in Freud, but above all from the unfolding of Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas, the hypothesis that the analytic experience demands from the analyst a particular form of affective presence, which must be capable of withstanding the proximity of suffering, ambivalence, helplessness, and symbolic precariousness. In this sense, love appears as an ethical sustenance in the face of the analysand’s vulnerability.

The analyst who can love is, therefore, capable of sheltering within themselves the other’s pain, welcoming and recognizing the suffering, without judgment, remaining present in the face of the unformed and the unsayable. In this way, we can transpose Paul’s formulation – “if I have not love, I am nothing” – and to think of it in light of the psychoanalytic clinic. Based on the reflections of this work, we believe that without the analyst’s love, without their loving, receptive, and implicated openness, the analytic process would also “be nothing,” as it would lose its transformative power.

And just as the apostle places love above faith and hope, we argue that, in psychoanalysis, love sustains the possibility that psychic suffering may find form, recognition, and resonance; it is a condition that enables the bond. We therefore have love in psychoanalysis as a sine qua non element of the analytic process – the ethos of analytic listening.

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Authors

[1] Ana Fátima Aguia, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, holds a Master’s degree and is a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of São Paulo (Institute of Psychology - IPUSP). Ana is a research collaborator at the Interinstitutional Laboratory for the Study of Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (LIPSIC) and member of the Brazilian Sándor Ferenczi Research Group (GBPSF) and the International Sándor Ferenczi Network (ISFN).

[2] Marina F.R. Ribeiro is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and a Full Professor in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of São Paulo (Institute of Psychology - IPUSP), coordinator of the Interinstitutional Laboratory for the Study of Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (LIPSIC) and Member of the Brazilian Sándor Ferenczi Research Group (GBPSF) and the International Sándor Ferenczi Network (ISFN).

Notes

[1] Our translation.

[2] Drawing upon the same Freudian audacity (1921), we choose to privilege the term “love” for the analyst’s feeling towards the analysand – even though, more often than not, it is due to a fear of misunderstandings or, as Freud says, to avoid hostility, that the word “love” is frequently replaced, in the very context we are employing it in this article, by synonyms and/or derivatives such as affection, affectivity, gesture, and empathy, among others.

[3] Translator’s note: The Latin phrase “ferrum et ignis” translates literally to “iron and fire.” It traditionally signifies a process of brutal, purgatorial transformation – an unstoppable force that destroys to purify or create anew.

[4] It is known that Sándor Ferenczi’s thought remained in ostracism within the psychoanalytic field, after Ernest Jones deemed him mad in his final writings and years of life (Moreno & Coelho, 2012, p. 708).

[5] Translator’s note: Translation of the quotations from Borgogno (2004a) areby the current translator

[6] Our translation.