One of the
proponents who attempt to shed a new light on Ferenczi's original notion of IWA
is Jay Frankel (2002). (Frankel,
J. (2002) Exploring Ferenczi's Concept of Identification with the Aggressor:
Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life, and the Therapeutic Relationship. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 12:101-139)
He stresses that although many of us attribute this notion to
that of Anna Freud, (as L & P does as we saw above), Frenczi’s notion of
IWA should be honored for its originality, and his original notion was
practically very different from IWA proposed by Anna Freud, which basically
means that the victim turn the situation around and becomes aggressor
him/herself. “by impersonating the
aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child
transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the
threat” (A.Freud, 1936, p.
113).
Frankel
carefully guides us to explore Ferenczi’s original meaning of IWA.
Frankel
states that Ferenczi introduced this term in his work in 1933 (Ferenczi, 1933),
three years before Anna Freud’s work (1936)
Ferenczi, S. (1933), Confusion of tongues between
adults and the child. In:
Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of
Psycho-Analysis, ed.
M. Balint (trans. E. Mosbacher). London
167., Freud, A. (1936), The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense (rev.). New York
International Universities Press.
One of the
reasons that Ferenczi's notion did not gain initial recognition was because of
the specific circumstances in which his idea was initially presented. His 1933
paper was presented at the Weisbaden Congress in September 1932 and published
in German in 1933. Unfortunately it was not translated in English and published
until 1949.
Frankel succinctly summarizes Ferenci’s idea presented in this
paper.” Exploring the early memories of his adult patients who had been
abused as children, Ferenczi (1933) found evidence that children who are
terrified by adults who are out of control will “subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the
aggressor to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely
oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor…. The weak and undeveloped personality reacts to sudden
unpleasure not by defence, but by anxiety-ridden identification and by
introjection of the menacing person or aggressor” (pp. 162-163, entire passage italicized in the original). The
child “become[s] one” (p. 165) with the attacker.
