The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Johnson (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988).

It appears that for now at any rate Sandor Ferenczi has achieved central standing as a proponent of clinical practices in analysis that are an alternative to those of the orthodox approach. Certainly others have also notably challenged traditionalism; but Carl Jung's recommendations, for example, are so encased in such an alien vocabulary, for those of us educated conventionally in Freud's school, that Jung's ideas on clinical matters have scarcely gained much currency within the so-called mainstream. In any event, the name lung is still so colored by the charge of analytic heresy that, combined with the fact of his political collaboration with the Nazis, it is hard for Freud's descendants to listen to reports of Jung's work without feeling that they have somehow betrayed their origins. The works of Karen Horney and also someone like Franz Alexander (oddly enough, one of Horney's critics), both of whom initiated important clinical departures from Freud's own stated recommendations, have also been too easy for many analysts to sidestep, since organizational difficulties tended to leave them both relatively isolated.

Although considerable controversy has been associated with Ferenczi's name, it is impossible for the history of psychoanalysis ever silently to skip by him because of the many years in which he was in such close and intimate contact with Freud. We are still expectantly awaiting the publication of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, which is currently being edited in Paris under the guidance of Judith Dupont, who is also responsible for the editing of this Clinical Diary; these letters should establish the full intimacy between the two men, as well as help us understand the circumstances of their ultimate falling out.

Paradoxically, although Ferenczi during his last years in contact with Freud and for the period of this Clinical Diary devoted a great deal of attention to matters of technique, within the psychoanalytic movement as a whole he was not someone wh