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Peter Rudnytsky is an experienced and well-known historian of psychoanalysis who has authored many brilliant collections of essays, among them The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991), Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002), Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011). This is however his first book conceived as an integral whole since his early Freud and Oedipus (1987), which was written more than three decades ago. Its subject, mutual analysis, deserves indeed an all-around examination, especially because it has been usually perceived either as a blatant manifestation of Ferenczi's alleged mental deterioration or as a utopian experiment doomed to unavoidable failure. Even Michael Balint had been rather dismissive about his master's grand experiment. Mutual analysis has indeed elicited so many doubts that when Judith Dupont, Balint's niece and literary heir, took the decision to make public Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1932), she had to resist the discouraging advice given even by scholars who were sympathetic to Ferenczi. As we know, the result of her venture was nothing else than the Ferenczi Renaissance, a movement of ideas and people that has kept growing, while the Freudian metapsychological frame was sinking. Yet, in spite of the growing consensus in favor of Ferenczi's views, especially on trauma, his mutual analysis remained somehow stuck in the corner. Despite presenting many brilliant micro-analyses, it never overcame the status of a dubious ad hoc experiment, which was not to be taken as an inspiring model by practitioners. In his new book1, Rudnytsky challenges this crystallized view, coming to the conclusion that Ferenczi's mutual analysis should be considered as “the paradigm for the contemporary shift to a two-person conceptualization of clinical work, just as Freud's self-analysis was paradigmatic for the one-person perspective of classical theory” (p. 8).
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