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In response to the recent special issue of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis dedicated to SAndor Ferenczi's works, this article highlights his essay entitled, "A Little Chanticleer" as a first-of-its-kind legacy of a description of conscious and unconscious dynamics linked to a child's musical preferences in daily life. In addition to its historical value, Ferenczi's essay merits study from contemporary viewpoints on infant developmental research, including implications for treatment of adults. It is hoped that at least in the context of song recall Ferenczi's essay will gain its due recognition.
KEY WORD Ferenczi; songs; child development; Chanticleer.
Recently, Giselle Galdi, guest editor of the special issue of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis on the contributions of Sandor Ferenczi (Vol. 58, 1, 1998), expressed her hope that the issue would be a harbinger of future articles about Ferenczi. Her desire for a continuing, belated honoring of Ferenczi's seminal ideas triggered this response article. it brought to mind a unique, rarely mentioned case Ferenczi presented and which Freud included in great detail in "The Return of Totemism in Childhood" in Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912-131) to make a different point than the one to be proposed here: It remains to be recognized that Ferenczi's (1913a) "Ein kleiner Hahnemann" ("A Little Chanticleer") is a historical example of unconscious and conscious determinants of a 5-year-old child's preference for particular songs in everyday life.
Freud (1913 [1912-13]) cited Ferenczi's essay considering it, "an interesting history of a single case which can only be described as an instance of positive totemism in a child" (italics in original, p. 130). The child's interest in songs were only mentioned in passim: "They [chickens and other kinds of poultry] were his only toys and he only sang songs that had some mention of fowls in them" (italics added, p. 130), and thus this issue could be easily overlooked. Afterward, Ferenczi's (1913b) work was published in the Zeitschrift.
Besides its contribution to totemism underscored by Freud, however, Ferenczi's essay also supports Freud's (1901) seminal remarks about the interpretation of tunes that come to mind, added in 1907 to the second edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
If anyone takes the trouble, as Jung (1907) and Maeder (1909) have done, to note the...