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Henry Markman's thought-provoking and clinically useful paper on the analysis of mutuality extends ideas that Ferenzci was developing in the last years of his life and which he documented in The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi (Ferenczi & Dupont, 1988). Ferenczi, who lived in Budapest, was one of Freud's earliest and most devoted followers. When Freud made his trip to the U.S. in 1909, it was Ferenczi and Jung whom he asked to accompany him. Ferenczi was also analyzed by Freud during three different, rather short periods of time. And it was Ferenczi's dissatisfaction and disappointment with this analysis that sparked many of his departures from classical analytic technique. Ferenczi accused Freud of failing to “see through and to bring out the transference of negative feelings and fantasies” (, as cited in Haynal, 2002). Ferenczi argued that the exploration of negative affects on both sides leads to an emotional honesty between therapist and patient that is key to therapeutic success.1 The analysis of mutuality that Markman proposes implicitly and explicitly builds on this idea. He also follows Ferenczi in arguing that before we assume a patient's negative feelings about us are the product of his or her pathological distortions (i.e., transference), we need to listen for the underlying truth of the patient's complaints and observations.
Essentially, Ferenczi broke with Freud over the importance of reality. He believed his very ill patients, mostly women, suffered much less from unconscious incestuous impulses and much more from actual sexual abuse and the relational devastation that comes in its wake. Like Ferenczi, Markman emphasizes how most if not all of our patients suffer from the