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Why revisit Ferenczi? Now perhaps the least celebrated of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, once his star shone brightly. Not only was he elected the first honorary member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, but he was also analyst to, amongst significant others, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, John Rickman and Michael Balint.
In the US however his technical and theoretical contributions have been championed by adherents of the relational, interpersonal and self-psychological movements. This of course reflects his notorious remark that ‘Freud's treatment was unfriendly’. Balint's gloss on this was that Ferenczi's profound humility led him to insist that analysts needed to ‘sacrifice a large amount of medical narcissism’ in order to become ‘the well-meaning, motherly, tender, understanding companion with whom it is possible for the patient to live through the painful events of his early life’ (p. xvi). For Erich Fromm, for instance, Ferenczi's approach represented the welcome antidote to Freud's masking of ‘the doctor's hidden sadism’ by valorising the analyst as father-figure. Whether Ferenczi's flexible, accommodating stance may indeed lead to an unconstrained empathic rapport or, as some fear, to the analytic baby being thrown out with the bathwater, is a matter of ongoing contention.
Be that as it may, there have been regular gatherings, particularly in London, over the past 20 years to celebrate and develop Ferenczi's contribution; this volume represents the pick of those papers. It opens with a chapter entitled ‘Ferenczi remembered’, a collection of obituaries and remembrances by those who had intimate contact with him; analysands and prominent figures in the then excitingly creative world of Budapest. What struck me most forcibly from reading through these testimonies is just how radical the impact of the concept of repression, which we now take so much for granted, was on the culture of the time — and Ferenczi, alongside of course Freud, was