Freud described Ferenczi's Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality as "the boldest application of psycho-analysis that was ever attempted" (1933a, p. 228). It is worth noting that the Hungarian edition of the work (Buda-pest, 1929) bore a different title: "Catastrophes in the Development of the Genital Function: A Psychoanalytic Study."

Ferenczi takes as his first axis of reference the parallelism between catastrophic moments in the development of the embryo (or ontogenesis) on the one hand, and in the evolution of the species (or phylogenesis) on the other. Proposing a vast fresco, summarized in a synoptic table of presumed parallels (p. 69) and based on Lamarck's evolutionary theories and on Haeckel's fundamental rule of recapitulation, which it rounds out, he brings together two seemingly distinct temporal perspectives: the time of the germ cell, when the human was a mere monoblast destined by fertilization to become an egg,...