(1940). Psychoanalytic Review, 27:254-255 Ferenczi, Sandor. Thalassa. A theory of genitality. Authorized Translation by H. A. Bunker, M.D. Albany. Psychoanal. Q. $1.75. While wiling away the time in camp in the early phases of the World War Dr. Ferenczi wrote out some of these pages. Some ten years later he collected, revised and edited them into book form and they were so issued. His general thesis is a biological one with a bias toward the Lamarckian concept that use develops structure which is then handed on in the genes. This led him to the inevitable conclusion that psychical functions and structures obeyed similar laws as the so-called organ functions and structures, concepts, be it interjected, as old as the days of the Homeric Greeks when psycho-somatic was thought of without a hyphen, as its opposite came to be the fashion with Plato and the scholastics. So Ferenczi returned to the older monistic conception of life's processes and finally through the tool of psychoanalysis found analogies and homologies of significance for understanding. He first introduces the conception of amphimixis as a partial fusion of urethral and anal impulses [This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.] |
