You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The task of reviewing this book is a challenge similar to the one we face when we stop to admire a large fresco, feel overstimulated by it and struggle to find words that could describe the full extent of our first impression, concerned lest the painting as a whole should, as a result, be reduced to fragments.
The book, like the international conference ‘Clinical Sándor Ferenczi’ (Turin, 18-21 July 2002), the contributions to which are included in this volume, is a powerful, passionate and highly documented act of love towards this analyst and his work, as well as towards psychoanalysis as a whole. At a time when the crisis in our profession is monitored almost daily by the psychoanalytic community, this work can be seen as a powerful call for us to reconsider the model of psychoanalysis and of psychoanalyst bequeathed to us by Sándor Ferenczi himself. If we do not want our complaints to sound like those of peevish exiles from a land of privilege and superiority (the lost Golden Age of psychoanalysis), then we should humbly show our willingness ‘to take a global and crucial step backwards and a little lower’, as Franco Borgogno (p. 17) writes in his fine introduction.
Following the same line of thought, many of the volume's contributors recognise the painful journey of Ferenczi's Clinical diary (Dupont, 1988 [1932]) as being one of crucial importance for psychoanalysis to transcend its current theoretical and clinical boundaries or, in other words, to learn to exceed the limits of the territory of ‘the other’, understood here both as the patient's psychic territory in the therapeutic relationship and as a territory of those other disciplines to which we should be open in order to inject fresh blood into our own profession. The overcoming of the mistrust people continue to feel towards Ferenczi—a mistrust still lingering here and there, even if less marked than before—means that he might be ‘promoted’ from the limbo into which he has been relegated for his mortal sin a