A aquisição do sentido de realidade segundo o pensamento de Sándor Ferenczi

Abstract

For a long time, researchers from the psychoanalysis field focused on the clinical innovations from Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, leaving aside the metapsychological aspects of his theory. Although initially based on Freudian ideais, Ferenczi also developed a rich and original metapsychological theory. The present work aims to analyse Sándor Ferenczi’s theory about the acquisition of the sense of reality, following the epistemology of psychoanalysis guidelines proposed by Monzani (1989). Starting from Freud’s theory about the transition from the “pleasure principle” to the “reality principle”, Ferenczi develops a series of original hypothesis regarding the process of transition between these principles and the possibility of a factual knowledge of the external world. Approaching the ego development from the prenatal period to the recognition of the external reality and the consequent possibility of scientific knowledge, Ferenczi presents a series of unprecedented formulations and takes psychoanalysis to points still not deeply explored. In adition to the consideration of a series of stages in which the individual must pass in order to acknowledge the external world at least in a partial factual way, the author also addresses the adaptation to reality in its phylogenetical aspects, as well as the role of the instincts throughout this process. The theory regarding the acquisition of the sense of reality consists of an adaptive theory, which encompasses internal and external processes in the subject’s psychic development and the routes one takes in order to obtain the satisfaction of desires among destructions and reconstructions.