Reconstructing ‘Bioanalysis’: Freud, Ferenczi and the Discomfort with Heredity

In their correspondence during the First World War, Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi engaged with biological speculation. Together they imagined a new science, which they called “bioanalysis,” asking whether evolutionary processes might be read like neuroses or hysterical symptoms: as regressive reactions to trauma, displaced across generations. The fragments of this endeavor oscillate between grandiosity and doubt. Ferenczi stated that the idea had come to him as a “bad joke, but I forced myself to take it seriously, though I am ready for the whole thing to turn out to be nonsense.” And yet the pair continued to develop this idea for more than a decade, leaving notable traces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Ferenczi’s Thalassa.

My talk discusses this unrealized project as a critical intervention into the scientific language of the long nineteenth century. Bioanalysis, I suggest, constitutes a covert counter-discourse, half in jest, half in earnest: both a playful and a desperate attempt to wrest the language of biology away from theories of degeneration that persisted in eugenicist thought long into the twentieth century. Precisely where it appears most biologically naïve, psychoanalysis intervenes in the entanglements of science, politics, and the cultural imaginary.

Jenny Willner is a professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She has published on authors such as Victor Klemperer, Franz Kafka, Peter Weiss, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Her recent focus lies on the intersection between the history of science, literature, and critical theory: “Hans Castorp jenseits des Lustprinzips. Einsamkeit, Sozialität und Biologie in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg” (2025), the co-edited anthology Towards the Limits of Freudian Thinking: Critical Edition and Readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2024), and the co-authored book Ferenczi Dialogues. On Trauma and Catastrophe (2023). Currently, she is finishing the monograph Unbehagen am Erbe. Die Politik der Psychoanalyse im Zeitalter der Eugenik.