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Ground-breaking practician and theoretician of psychoanalysis, founder of the International Psychoanalytical Association, one of its first presidents, the first university professor for psychoanalysis, near to becoming Freud's son-in-law, of whom Freud said that his works 'made all analysts into his pupils' (Freud, 1933, S.E. 22: p. 228), and that 'it is impossible to believe that the history of our science will ever forget him' (p. 229)—and yet, Martin Stanton's book presents itself on the dust jacket as 'the first study in English' on Sándor Ferenczi, the aim of which is, 'if nothing else … to inspire the reader to return to Ferenczi's work, to reread and reconsider it' (p. 3).
At a moment when psychoanalysis is returning to its history in order better to understand its own traditions, on the one hand to clarify problems in it (like the controversial discussions in the 40s in London), and on the other hand also to grasp the richness incorporated in these traditions on the background of an increasing availability of documents on the past (like the Minutes of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society and the various correspondences of Freud), turning to Ferenczi seems to be a rewarding enterprise. A good introduction to him is necessary for most psychoanalytic readers, whose notions about Ferenczi do, at best, not go far beyond what Jones was ready to communicate of them in a somewhat one-sided perspective.
This book is a fine introduction to different aspects of Ferenczi's life and work. After a curriculum vitae, which reminds us of the most important events in his life and of his environment, the first chapter of the book tries to elucidate Ferenczi's project, in showing how he found in the scientific models of his time a useful metaphoric language to evoke experiences of the inner work and of unconscious processes: '"useful fiction", convenient narrative forms to map out the patient's and the analyst's shared hidden and hazardous routes through the psychoanalytic ter