From Janet to Bromberg, via Ferenczi: standing in the spaces of the literature on dissociation

As Henri Ellenberger (1970) wrote, Pierre Janet’s work may be compared to a great city buried under the ashes, similar to Pompeii, a place that one day might be rediscovered and brought back to life again. This has been in several respects Janet’s destiny: his corpus has signified a vital transplant of ideas and discoveries that have influenced the contemporary discourse on several pathologies, and most especially on dissociation. A similar destiny awaited Sándor Ferenczi, who after decades of obscurity has now influenced and informed contemporary psychoanalytic views of trauma and dissociation, not least with his concept of identification with the aggressor on the part of the victim of violence and his therapeutic approach as it appears in his Clinical Diary (1932b).