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Sixty five years ago, when Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank presented their shared perspective upon the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, they did so as acknowledged leaders among those circled around Freud in his pioneering movement. They may also have shared their translator's view (Caroline Newton) that together they wielded the cutting edge of a freshly forged alloy of theory and technique.1
Theirs was an authoritative summary, spanning in 68 small pages their comprehension of what analysis was really about. In the first third of the work they (primarily Rank) delineated the psychoanalytic process and its desired intrapsychic outcome that should automatically unfold, providing that the analytic situation necessary for its unwinding be properly created and maintained through an optimal psychoanalytic relationship achieved through the technique and methods which they advocated. In the middle third they (primarily Ferenczi) critically reviewed and dismissed a sequence of earlier technical modes and skewed approaches of others (Jung, Stekel and Adler are singled out) out of a mistaken overextension of Freud's and Ferenczi's ideas. In the final third the authors summarized (somewhat expansively) the therapeutic effects to be expected from their own more sophisticated approach, and they predicted (somewhat rosily) the profound effects that their now-established science would have upon medicine, education and literature as part of the more enlightened neurosis-free culture analysis would have served to bring about.
What may have been a tour de force in its time, given its encompassing condensation and heaviness of exposition remains, if only for these reasons, impressive.2 But, as a tour of the source, a present-day sortie into the history of our analytic beginnings, it is not very satisfactory, particularly when contrasted with the more expository, clinically illuminated and experience-near works of both Ferenczi and Rank written before and after this ponderous e