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David Smith is right to emphasize that I state that Ferenczi never appealed to the veracity of patients' testimony. He is also correct in his assumption that I equally reject the claim that Ferenczi believed in the veracity of patients' perceptions of their analysts, a claim he contrasts with my ‘transference paradigm which describes patients' perceptions of analysts as fundamentally distorted’ (Smith 1998, p. 348). In this context, he suggests that to ‘neutralize’ this claim, I need to demonstrate that Myers (1996) has systematically misconstrued Ferenczi, and he challenges me specifically to provide an alternative reading of the following passage, which he quotes as follows:
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 associations, but also - and much more often than hitherto supposed - their repressed or suppressed criticism of us. (Ferenczi [1933a]1955, pp. 157-158, cited in Myers 1996, p. 28)
First of all, the term ‘veracity’ (Wahrhaftigkeit) does not figure in this passage, which is taken from Ferenczi's (1933) ‘Confusion of tongues’ paper, nor in the Clinical Diary (1988), which Myers and Smith take as their principal source, and it appears very rarely indeed in Ferenczi's work as a whole. When it is mentioned, it is mentioned problematically in the context of verification (Wahrheitsnachweis) of analytical explanations. In ‘Transitory symptom-constructions during the analysis’ (Ferenczi 1912), for example, Ferenczi states that:
So long as the psychical material afforded through free association is the only proof that the patient has of the correctness of the analytical explanations, they may seem to him remarkable, surprising, even illuminating; he still does not attain a conviction of their indub