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The project of ‘rediscovering’ Sandor Ferenczi has been an extremely interesting chapter in the recent history of psychoanalysis. In 1988 the formation of the Sandor Ferenczi Society in Budapest marked the moment of a possible new beginning—a time for working through the trauma that our capacity of psychoanalytical understanding has suffered by enactments of ‘cumulative splitting’ during the formative years of our discipline. This has opened up the way for recalling and reintegrating the image, and basic contributions of, Ferenczi and several other ‘lost children’ of the early analytical world. It has also made certain areas of our ‘forgotten knowledge’ rethinkable. These are concepts regarding the working of body-and-mind; the development and function of reality testing; the nature of individual and social traumatism; mutuality; technique; methodology; and also the dynamics of social development—including the vicissitudes of individual and group relations within the frames of our national and international institutes and societies, to mention just a few.
Over the last decade Ferenczi Societies have been formed in different countries. Conferences, publications, lectures and workshops have been devoted to the idea of bringing alive a wide range of his ideas, to achieving a deeper understanding of his surprisingly vivid