A Transitional Phase in our Understanding of the Psychoanalytic Process: A New Look at Ferenczi and Rank

In The Development of Psychoanalysis, Ferenczi and Rank (1922) demonstrate an important transitional phase in the conceptualization of the psychoanalytic process. It is not the archaic language of libidinal flow that separates their work from modern psychoanalysis, but their insistence on the ideal of the analysts's objective authority, despite the implicitly more current interpersonal and structural understandings embedded in their sound principles of character analysis. Freud's early theory presumed the possibility that an analyst could be an objective observer of forces entirely within the patient. Today's theories must account for newer intrapsychic, interpersonal, and intersubjective realities—the analyst's subjective experience as well as his observing functions. In the decade preceding the monograph, implicit developmental, structural, and object-relational understandings began to emerge. A concurrent dramatic but unacknowledged change in the meaning of the terms "psychic reality" and "intrapsychic" also occurred. The controversies surrounding the monograph predicted many lines of development and dialectics for future theoretical discourse. The subjects of countertransference and empathy, almost entirely absent in the monograph, became major fields of study, and focal points for divergent schools in the new struggle to define the necessary roles of the analyst's interaction and subjective experience.