Beyond the Narrowness of Disciplinary Borders: Biology and the Unconscious in Ferenczi's Thalassa-Primordial Phylogenetic Trauma and its Recapitulation in Ontogenesis.

Abstract

In this article, we present and discuss the essay Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924) by Sándor Ferenczi, a pioneer and one of the greatest innovators of psychoanalysis. This essay-which Freud lauded as the most ingenious application of psychoanalysis-proposed a theory that can bridge the gap between the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of genitality and the sexual act. Ferenczi speculatively elaborated a theory of genital development that connects two important Freudian works, namely Three Essays on Sexual Development (1905) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), with Haeckel's Fundamental Biogenetic Law, which discusses the recapitulation of phylogenesis in ontogenetic development. According to Ferenczi, coitus and sexual relations are driven by the desire to return to the mother's body, a desire that hearkens back to a period in evolution when life was entirely aquatic and life forms were ocean-dwelling. It has been claimed that the environmental catastrophes of sea recession and land emergence have had traumatic effects on animals' living conditions (resulting in the development of sexual differences) and genitality. Although the essay presented some fanciful, suggestive, and dubious theories, it remains relevant due to its epistemological and methodological implications, which are based on an utraquistic argumentative procedure (i.e., founded on the constant comparison of and recourse to isomorphisms and analogies among various disciplines, including biology, embryology, zoology, and psychoanalysis), laying the foundation for a method of bioanalysis.