Ferenczi's Researches in Technique

This third special issue of papers presented and discussed at the Ferenczi in Firenze Conference in 2018 (Koritar, 2018, 2019) will focus on psychoanalytic research. Both Freud and Ferenczi were interested in studying the mind and the process of thinking. In a sense they can be considered as psychoanalytic conquistadors exploring the hidden reaches of a dark continent: the Unconscious. Their discoveries would guide generations of psychoanalytic researchers and clinicians in their praxis.

Close collaborators in their early careers, they parted ways in their theoretical and clinical perspectives in the mid-1920's. Whereas Freud contributed to our understanding of the underlying psychic mechanisms of the mind in the development of his sophisticated Metapsychology; Ferenczi, focused his psychoanalytic researches on the technical aspects of clinical practice (Haynal, 1988). The two had quite distinct approaches in their research. Freud, at heart a biological researcher, strove to develop models of the mind and thinking based first on a topographical and later, a structural paradigm. His was a rational and Cartesian approach based on concepts of the economic distribution of psychic energies and their repression. Ferenczi was more interested in discovering approaches to work with mentally afflicted individuals and searched for cures for their disturbances. Freud's research methodology was based on the ideal of objective observation of mental phenomena, and concept formation that

represented a hypothe