“Seeing is Believing.” Ferenczi’s Presentation of “Urprojektion” as Theoretical Fiction

This paper analyzes the forms of writing employed by Sándor Ferenczi
(1873-1933) in his early attempts to develop a theory of thinking and its
origins in infantile experience. Attention will be paid to the significance of
Ferenczi's formulations concerning the figurality of unconscious thoughts in
relation to the emergence of a sense of reality. Those formulations, this paper
aims to show, take shape in important instances by means of allusions to and
citations from texts outside the psychoanalytic literature - from the
philosophical writings of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach to the literary
writings of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Theodor Vischer.