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A few years ago it would have been imperative to thoroughly introduce Ferenczi, the founder of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis. Although the importance of his work was once widely known, after his death in 1933 he slid into near obscurity. Writings about him were rare. Anyone who wanted to know him had to be a detective if not a polyglot. Ferenczi's significance in psychoanalysis was kept a secret. The publication of his Clinical Diary—originally written in 1932 but not available to the English-speaking psychoanalytic community until 1988-made Sándor Ferenczi a point of reference again. We now realize that he may have started what amounts to the beginnings of alternative theories to the classical orientation: the object relations, interpersonal, relational, and self-psychological points of view. The pages that follow are compiled by the editor from material that reflects major areas of interest for the Ferenczi reader.
Ferenczi was a favorite disciple of Freud. They were friends, colleagues, and close collaborators. Freud and Ferenczi exchanged about 2,500 letters from 1908 until 1933. Two volumes of this correspondence have been already published and these letters provide us with an inside view of the complex workings of their relationship. For years we had been told about the relationship solely from Freud's perspective as advanced in 1955 by Freud biographer Ernest Jones. In Lewis Aron's paper we are privileged to read about the relationship from Ferenczi's perspective. Aron is motivated