[Mutual co-subordination. A formula by Ferenczi that anticipates the double-bind]

Sándor Ferenczi, a permanent correspondent of Freud's from 1908 to 1933, the year of his sudden death, is the first psychoanalyst of this heroic period to have had the clinical intuition of the double-bind situation. Because of his childhood which he was led to analyse in detail, and the neurotic repetitions in which he found himself involved, he succeeded in theorizing the importance of the double languages at the root of the psychological disorders of the child and adult, which constitute disguised forms taken by an early trauma creating effects of confusion: this theorization was accomplished in 1932 exactly. We have given a number of significant examples dating from 1878 to 1880 in this article. Mutual co-subordination, a veritable reciprocal and simultaneous dependency link, was one of his last formulations and resulted from the work he gave a detailed account of in his Clinical Journal, the legacy of a clinician and a key text that enables us to grasp in a retroactive manner the full originality of Ferenczi's thought. Could it be possible today to forsee a transformation in doctrines, going as far as to re-interpret the history of our science in terms of an evolutive retroaction?