Elizabeth Severn, known as "R.N." in Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary, was Ferenczi's analysand for eight years, the patient with whom he conducted his controversial experiment in mutual analysis, and a psychoanalyst in her own right who had a transformative influence on his work. The Discovery of the Self is the distillation of that experience and allows us to hear the voice of one of the most important patients in the history of psychoanalysis. However, Freud branded Severn Ferenczi's "evil genius" and her name does not appear in Ernest Jones's biography, so she has remained largely unknown until now. This book is a reissue of Severn's landmark work of 1933, together with an introduction by Peter L. Rudnytsky that sets out the unrecognized importance of her thinking both for the development of psychoanalysis and for contemporary theory.
Inspired by the realization that Severn has embedded disguised case histories both of herself and of Ferenczi, as well as of her daughter Margaret, Rudnytsky shows how The Discovery of the Self contains "the other side of the story" of mutual analysis and is thus an indispensable companion volume to the Clinical Diary. A full partner in Ferenczi's rehabilitation of trauma theory and champion of the view that the analyst must participate in the patient's reliving of past experiences, Severn emerges as the most profound conduit for Ferenczi's legacy in the United States, if not in the entire world.
Lacking any institutional credentials and once completely marginalized, Elizabeth Severn can at long last be given her due as a formidable psychoanalyst. Newly available for the first time in more than eighty years, The Discovery of the Self is simultaneously an engaging introduction to psychotherapy that will appeal to general readers as well as a sophisticated text to be savored by psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians as a "prequel" to the works of Heinz Kohut and a neglected classic of relational psychoanalysis.
Industry Reviews
"The Discovery of the Self is a fascinating and historically significant work introducing and promoting a psychoanalytic project (with underpinnings of Freud and Ferenczi) for a general audience. We see Severn's preoccupation with trauma and fragmentation and her determination to explore the newly opened realm of unconscious forces underlying conscious thought and action. This was and still is the most alarming and unsettling aspect of psychoanalytic thought. Severn understands its fecundity and makes her case with fervor and clarity."-from the essay The Work of Elizabeth Severn: An Appreciation by Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron.
"Just as Josef Breuer and Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") are known as co-creators of the talking cure, another generative dyad, Sandor Ferenczi and Elizabeth Severn ("R.N."), co-created mutual analysis. Nowadays, nobody practices it concretely (patient and therapist taking turns on the analytic couch), but we recognize its enormous contribution to appreciating intersubjectivity and thoughtful self-disclosure in psychoanalytic treatment. So far we knew about this bold experiment only from Ferenczi's Clinical Diary; with the republication of Severn's Discovery of the Self, the other side of the coin allows us fuller understanding of their fateful encounter."-Emanuel Berman, Ph.D, Israel Psychoanalytic Society.
