You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It could easily have been Sandor Ferenczi's fate to have been an interesting but relatively minor figure in the history of psychoanalysis. It was, after all, he who conducted the first training analysis (with Ernest Jones), who introduced Melanie Klein to her analyst Karl Abraham, who proposed the creation of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and who was the first Professor of Psychoanalysis (at the University of Budapest under the short-lived revolutionary government of Bela Kim in ).
Ferenczi's reputation was not helped, to put it mildly, by rumours (said to have originated with his former analysand Jones) that he had sexual relations with patients and by Jones' claim in his biography of Freud that he - Ferenczi - had become psychotic, thus discrediting much of his later work. Ferenczi's fate as someone who might well be ‘interesting’ but whose work was not really worth serious consideration seemed to be sealed when he was prayed in aid, albeit critically, by the psychoanalytic renegade Jeffrey Masson. In his book attacking Freud on the issue of sexual abuse of children, The Assault on Truth, Masson republished Ferenczi's paper 'Confusion of tongues between adults and the child', claiming Ferenczi as one who had rediscovered what Freud had suppressed. Even those seemingly better disposed towards Ferenczi have contributed to his minimal reputation, recognising his ‘influence’ but only as something that had been superseded by later generations, particularly those of Klein and Balint and their followers.