Paperback, 110 pages
English language
Published by W. W. Norton.
In Thalassa, Ferenczi expands the symbols of pallus and vagina into cosmic symbols, not by reference to myths but by his interpretations of embryonic, physiological, and psychological facts. he develops the view that the whole of life is determined by a tendency to return to the womb, equating the process of birth with the phylogenetic transition of animal life from water to land, and linking coitus to the idea of "thalassal regression": "the longing for the sea-life from which man emerged in primeval times."
I get it. It must've been quite interesting and influential during its time.
But it isn't anymore. If anything, this serves as an archetypal example of the worst ways of deriving theoretical conclusions from psychoanalysis (or importing conclusions from other fields into it).
