Why Ferenczi? The Empathic Style in Psychoanalysis; by Daniel Kupermann; English technical revision by Mariana Toledo;  Blucher, 2024,  208 pages, paperback, R$80 (C$30)

Daniel Kupermann's title provokes the question of Sándor Ferenczi's relevance to contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. Ferenczi, after all, had become a persona non grata in psychoanalytic circles after the presentation of his paper “Confusion of Tongues” at the 1932 IPA Congress in Wiesbaden, where he returned to Freud's initial theory of psychopathology based on childhood physical, sexual, or emotional trauma impacting ego development, a theory Freud himself abandoned by 1900.

Ferenczi's environmentally based theory of etiology was at variance with Freud's phylogenetic economic theory of internally generated drives resulting in trauma due to unconscious conflict and a sense of danger triggering the activation of ego defenses to contain the perceived danger. Yet, up until the mid 1920s, Ferenczi had been Freud's closest collaborator. They had complementary visions of psychoanalytic theory and praxis. While Freud, the inveterate biology researcher, dedicated himself to developing a metapsychology of mental mechanisms underlying human thinking and behaviour, Ferenczi was more interested in how the psychoanalytic model of the mind can be applied to helping cure patients suffering from mental health disorders. While Freud

developed elegant models describing the functioning of mental mechanisms, Ferenczi applied Freud's ideas to the clinical setting in a series of experiments with technique in his attempts to heal patients with various psychological issues. While Freud criticized Ferenczi for his passion to cure, Daniel Kupermann turns the critique around in considering Ferenczi's passion as an ethics of care for the other and a sensitive attunement to the other's distress. As Kupermann outlines the evolution of Ferenczi's clinical work, it becomes apparent that Ferenczi developed technical approaches that were har