Ferenczi, Rn, and the Struggle for Equal Ground

Sandor Ferenczi's inauguration of a postinterpretive era within psychoanalytic practice is built on the centrality of interpersonal relations between patient and analyst (Miller, 1991; Thompson, 1950). His contributions grow from the conviction that individuals' capacities to understand one another operate at a level often unarticulated within shared conscious awareness.

This conviction shifts the way in which the analyst comes to know the patient. Together with knowledge of theory and the data of the patient's narrative, direct experience of the patient within the therapeutic dyad informs the therapist's activity. Transference enlarges from repetition to authentic present experience, interpersonally accessible to either or both participants through their joint therapeutic relatedness.

Ferenczi's mature, if unruly, description of this process is illustrated in the case record of RN. The case is the central treatment of his last work, The Clinical Diary (Ferenczi, 1988). From the origins of psychoanalysis, the participations of analyst and patient are reflected in treatment records. Beginning with the cases in The Studies On Hysteria, Breuer and Freud present not only the foundations of metapsychology, but the qualitative dimensions of interpersonal relatedness between patient and analyst. The benchmarks cut by Anna O., Emmy von N., and later, Dora, describe a progression of conceptual recognitions in the patient-analyst field. These include: shared inquiry into personal meaning, the operation of resistance, and the emergence of transference (Breuer, 1895; Freud, 1895, 1905).

Each case history also breaks through its theoretical contributions to arrive at a unique pattern of interpersonal relations between analyst and patient. The cases initially described by Breuer and Freud are thick with descriptions of the particulars of patienttherapist interaction. Breuer's case description of Anna O. reflects