Repetition, Reliving and the Drives

This chapter explores Sándor Ferenczi's productive revisions to the Freudian theory of the drives and asks what a Ferenczian Nachträglichkeit might look like. Raluca Soreanu elaborates on the psychic temporality of reliving , which is grounded in a new reading of repetition and remembering. The chapter follows Ferenczi's orientation in relation to the ‘alien body’ of the death drive, in the context of his theory of psychic fragmentation. Soreanu argues that there are two things lost in Freud's 1920 text ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: some credible ‘inheritors’ to the ego instincts, and an openness to forms of repetition that are not bound with the death drive. Ferenczi's constructions on ‘re-living’ and ‘neo-catharsis’ offer an important solution to these impasses. Furthermore, Soreanu discusses Ferenczi's ideas on ‘the feminine principle’, grounded in a vocabulary of conciliation, endurance of suffering, selflessness, appeasement, adaptation, renunciation and self-denial. This brings a re-evaluation of the duality of the drives (life drive and death drive), which Ferenczi renames as ‘drive of self-assertion’ and the ‘drive of conciliation’. Finally, Soreanu shows how ‘the feminine principle’ offers a revision to conceptions of genitality and to new avenues for theory of sexuality.