Revisiting Ferenczi: Trauma in the South African Context

Sandor Ferenczi, a close colleague of Freud's, has over the past decade been reintroduced to the canon of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi termed the concept - identification with the aggressor- and also wrote movingly about the impact of sexual abuse on children. His contribution to understanding trauma and its impact on the psyche is of huge relevance to clinicians working in this area.

Sue Levy will be discussing Sandor Ferenczi's's work. She is particularly interested in how apartheid trauma has impacted all aspects of society in South Africa. She will link Ferenczi's views with contemporary theories of trauma to highlight the relationship between childhood trauma and "trauma themed" adult functioning in society.

Facilitator:

Sue Levy is a SAPA Training Analyst and Clinical Psychologist. She began her career working with South African anti-apartheid activists who had been tortured by the SA regime. She then spent 12 years in London working at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and later headed up the Trauma Unit at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London. She returned to SA in 2001 and was a founding member of the South Africa Psychoanalysis Association SAPA.

In 2016 she established the SAPA/SAPI/UBUBELE Low Fee Service which offered psychotherapy and psychoanalysispro bono or at a low fee to people unable to afford private rates. That Service is now the Johannesburg PsychoanalyticClinic and for the first time, in Jan 2025, will have a permanent brick-and-mortar home in Parktown. Sue has co-edited a book on Trauma with Alessandra Lemma (The Perversion of Loss: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Trauma). The book has been translated into Russian and is currently being translated into Polish. She has a chapter in the recent Tavistock publication Complex Trauma edited by Jo Stubley and Linda Young.