Brigid Doherty (Princeton): »Seeing is Believing.« Ferenczi's Presentation of »Urprojektion« as Theoretical Fiction

This paper analyzes the forms of writing employed by Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) in his early attempts to develop a theory of thinking and its origins in infantile experience. Attention will be paid to the significance of Ferenczi's formulations concerning the figurality of unconscious thoughts in relation to the emergence of a sense of reality. Those formulations, this paper aims to show, take shape in important instances by means of allusions to and citations from texts outside the psychoanalytic literature — from the philosophical writings of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach to the literary writings of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Theodor Vischer.