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In this very interesting and important book, the innovative psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi, is aptly described as “Freud's most exceptional disciple” (p. 9). As founder and President of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society from its inception in 1913 until his death in 1933, Ferenczi's work and his legacy are outlined with great care by authors, Alberto Fergusson and Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez, who call Ferenczi “one of the most important psychoanalysts of all time” (p. 1). They also note, however, that his work has often been ignored, and examine the various reasons for this throughout the book.
Ferenczi was a member of the first generation of psychoanalysts. He and Freud were close friends and colleagues who worked and vacationed together, their relationship well-documented here and in their numerous correspondences. Freud early on recognized his colleague's great importance to psychoanalysis, but we see here how Ferenczi's later revolutionary contributions eventually complicated their relationship. These ideas included his theoretical insights into the infant's primitive mental life, and his awareness of the imperative clinical need to reach these more primitive levels of the patient's mind. Ferenczi's determination to find ways to make contact at those deeper levels of mental life, was no doubt fueled in part by his own troubled early history of maternal coldness and neglect, which seemed to open him up to deeper emotional understanding of the infant mind than Freud could fathom.
The authors quote Lacan, “Ferenczi was to some extent considered, up to 1930, to be the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis… a freewheeler” (pp. 43, 44). Ferenczi also said as much of himself, stating that he was “regarded as a restless spirit, or the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis” (p. 15). Indeed, his ideas remain challenging to some psychoanalysts to this day, although many of his innovations have become widely accepted. Melanie Klein, Ferenczi's analysand, was greatly influenced by his id