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This short book is the fourth in a series designed to bring attention to the historical literature of psychoanalysis, specifically in this volume some of the publications of Ferenczi and Rank. This volume will be of interest only to those who are both psychoanalytically trained and interested in the process of development
of psychoanalytic thought. This volume is a work put together by both Ferenczi and Rank in 1922, translated in 1924 by Caroline Newton. Sandor Ferenczi was a prolific writer. In 1950, the Hogarth Press of London published 90 of his papers plus a bibliography of 173 items written between 1899 and 1926.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis, the authors discuss a schematic approach to what they call the science of psychoanalysis that will remind most readers of their early analytic course work. The analytic situation is presented rather dogmatically as an unwinding of the libido primarily in the transference neurosis. This unhooking, so to speak, of primitive fixation within the analytic dyad, when interpreted can then free the “libido fixation” by direct and interpersonal experience. There is some considerable discussion of the failure of understanding alone to effect a cure; rather, a direct affect experience in psychoanalysis is necessary.
The second portion, Chapter III, deals sequentially with a series of mistakes, according to Ferenczi and Rank, that have been made by precursors in the analytic scheme. These include (1) the danger of merely listening, called “descriptive analysis”; (2) mere collecting of associations (free or otherwise) that do not shift the affect; (3) a fanaticism for interpreting that yields no results; (4) preoccupation with what a dream really “means” plus the games that can accompany such activity; (5) overuse of suggestion to get symptoms to disappear; (6) the “sin” of analysis of complexes that they feel is more the realm of the psychologist; (7) overemphasis on the sexual factor, rather than taking Freud's later conclus