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J. Dupont (ed.), The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
ON OCCASION, WITHIN THE seemingly endless flood of publications in psychoanalysis, there appears a major work with extraordinary implications for the understanding of the conceptual and the clinical dimensions of psychoanalytic inquiry, and for reviewing the historical background of how they developed in new directions as well. Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary is such a major work. A singular publishing event of 1988, though written by a brilliant contributor to psychoanalysis in 1932, it should become required reading for anyone interested in the emerging differences among the first generation of psychoanalysts; and, from the standpoint of their therapeutic concerns, in the rise during the late 1920s and early 1930s of various creative approaches whose influences still dominate the three major schools of the present—Austrian ego psychology, British object relations, and American interpersonal relations. These three schools of psychoanalytic thought and practice are, because of their general outlook but for dissimilar reasons, all deeply indebted to this imaginative and courageous, yet mercurial and, finally, personally unfulfilled pioneer. I do not, in the space of these comments, expect to encompass all that is contained in Ferenczi's Clinical Diary —what he explores, extablishes, and envisions. I can only hope to whet the interest of the readers of this Journal, and strongly urge them to discover this radical, refreshing, and most informative work for themselves.
I limit my discussion to but three from among the many richly innovative themes it suggests: first, the series of clinical experiments