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I would like to give a brief response to Martin Stanton's (1997) severely critical comments on Piers Myers's (1996) paper ‘Sandor Ferenczi and patients' perceptions of analysis’.
In his paper, Myers kindly acknowledges me as the first writer to comment on the relationship between some of Ferenczi's ideas during the 1930s and the concepts developed by Robert Langs in the 1970s (Smith 1991). Myers has investigated these matters very deeply, and has extended and corrected errors in my own account. By any standard, Myers's work is an important contribution to the history of ideas in psychoanalysis.
Stanton is anxious to refute two claims made by Myers. The first of these is the claim that, towards the end of his life, Ferenczi was concerned with the veracity of patients' perceptions of their analysts (as opposed to the transference paradigm, which describes patients' perceptions of their analysts as fundamentally distorted). According to Stanton (1997) ‘Ferenczi never appealed to the “veracity” of patients' testimony’ (my italics) (p. 556). In his paper, Myers provides us with evidence taken from Ferenczi's writings which strongly corroborate his claim. In order to neutralize Myers's argument, Stanton would need to demonstrate that Myers has systematically misconstrued Ferenczi. In order to defend his own thesis effectively, and to refute the claims made by Myers (and myself), Stanton needs to supply alternative interpretations of the meaning of passages like the following:
Gradually, then, I came to the conviction that the patients have an exceedingly refined sensitivity for the wishes, tendencies, whims, sympathies and antipathies of their analyst, even if the analyst is completely unaware of this sensitivity… This means that we must discern not only the painful events from their past from their associations, but also - and much more often than hitherto supposed - their repressed or suppressed criticism of us (, cited in Myers 1996, p. 28).
I would be grateful if Dr Stant