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.
From the time of its initial publication in France in 1985, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi has attracted attention predominantly for its historical significance. Seeing print long after Ferenczi's death, it provided the first substantial information from Ferenczi's perspective about his own work and about his deep, complicated, and insufficiently understood relationship with Sigmund Freud.
The striking freshness of the writing, which is a hallmark of the Diary, has been noted about Ferenczi's earlier work (Balint, 1948; Gedo, 1976; Hoffer, 1990). Michael Balint's observation (1967, p. 149) that for Ferenczi everything in the clinical encounter “remained alive forever” may help to explain the origin of his vivid style. Balint believed that potential existed for contemporary analysts to further their development by looking through Ferenczi's eyes at the clinical encounter. But ever since the orchestrated shaming that greeted the presentation of “Confusion of Tongues” at the Wiesbaden Congress in 1932, a climate of antagonism has persisted toward Ferenczi. Balint thought that it would take the simultaneous appearance in print of both the Diary and the complete Freud—Ferenczi correspondence to permit at last a more balanced reading.
Unfortunately, an additional 15 years would pass after Balint's death in 1970 before the initial publication of the Diary, and there would be substantial further delay for the correspondence. Mindful of Balint's concern, the Diary's editor, Judith Dupont, took a strong stand in her preface that the content of the Diary effectively refuted the notion that Ferenczi was psychotic in his last years (Dupont, in Ferenczi, 1988), as Ernest Jones had alleged and Freud himself implied (1933).