The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis: Volume II

‘Carlo Bonomi is a master detective. In the two volumes of The Cut he attempts to decipher Freud's emotional world and its impact on his theories. Uncovering many new facts, and boldly connecting and re-interpreting known facts, he outlines the place of male and female circumcision, seen at that time as a measure preventing dangerous masturbation, in Freud's life and work. In the second volume he suggests that Freud's close disciple and friend Ferenczi absorbed Freud's preoccupation with symbolic castration, but transformed it into his innovative theory of trauma, which aroused Freud's ambivalence.’ – Emanuel Berman, Ph.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Tel Aviv, Israel

‘With a deep knowledge of Freud’s life and work, particularly as it is revealed through autobiographical notes and correspondences, Bonomi attempts to formulate a new narrative of Master Sigmund’s evolution. The proposed hypothesis is fascinating, well documented and very innovative and enlightening. This second volume completes the oeuvre convincingly. A pleasure to read.’ – André E. Haynal M.D., Psychoanalyst (IPA) and Professor, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

‘By shedding a new light into the traumatic origins of psychoanalysis, Carlo Bonomi provides a meaningful and extremely rich context for the Freud-Ferenczi conflict. In his articulated narrative the author leans on the most founding dreams of the two men, their personal story, their deafnesses (in particular on Freud’s neglect of the feminine), their most impressing cases as well as on mythologies and religions. Using all these elements, he shows how the theories of Freud and Ferenczi took their origin in all these sources, developed, intertwining, confronting or completing each other and finally resulting in a cut between their two conceptions of psychoanalysis which had lasting consequences on the evolution of the psychoanalytic community, its ways of thinking and practising.’ – Dr Judith Dupont, Psychoanalyst, Member of Association Psychanalytique de France, Paris, France

‘Carlo Bonomi is indeed an original interpreter of the complex and complicated various steps of Freud in founding psychoanalysis. In the pages of the second volume of The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis he continues his journey into the origins of psychoanalysis, extending his exploration from Freud’s mind to the minds of other classic authors, principally Sándor Ferenczi, who, though not in open opposition with the Master, created a new language for trauma, offering many elements of a metapsychology much more respectful of patients and closer to their suffering. I can only recommend this alternative narrative of the building of psychoanalysis to all the people interested and curious in the still partially secret history of psychoanalysis, because I am sure that any reader will gain a lot independently from agreeing or not with its principal theses.’ – Franco Borgogno. Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (IPA), Professor of Clinical Psychology at Turin University, Turin, Italy