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The recent publication of Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1988), written in 1932, is a rich source of material on Ferenczi and his last ideas. The diary has given us access to Ferenczi's most intimate thoughts and feelings about his therapeutic work and his relationship with Freud. It has also revealed unknown aspects of Ferenczi's life and work: his experiment in mutual analysis, his discovery of his own early childhood traumas, and a detailed look at the therapeutic process which culminated in his final published papers, specifically his radical classic, ‘Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child’ (1933). Along with historical perspectives on Ferenczi, the diary has also introduced a number of Ferenczi's last patients, most particularly ‘R.N.’, the critically important, yet virtually unknown woman whose analytic treatment dominated Ferenczi's final years.
‘R.N.’ was Ferenczi's code-name for Elizabeth Severn, an early American ‘psychotherapist’ whose chronic symptoms and desperate mental state led her to seek the help of the famous Hungarian analyst. Severn's case - as R.N. - fills the diary's pages and establishes her profound influence on Ferenczi, and her role in his final radical challenge to classical psychoanalysis and to Freud himself. His ‘principal patient’, Severn was in analysis with Ferenczi in Budapest for eight years - from 1924 until just before his death in 1933 Elizabeth Severn's case and her analytic relationship with Ferenczi is an important paradigm case, a pivotal point in the history and development of psychoanalysis in the tradition of Anna 0 and Dora. Through her initiation of the experiment in mutual analysis, Severn was the catalyst for Ferenczi's recognition of the clinical significance of countertransference (Wolstein 1989). She was also a critical factor in his early understanding of the dynamics of childhood sexual trauma, including his own. This understanding led Ferenczi to reconsider Freud's early trauma theory; in doing so