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Arnold William Rachman, who is arguably the preeminent American Ferenczi scholar, has generated a study of Ferenczi that deserves reading by every student and practitioner of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Freud himself asserted that every psychoanalyst should remain a student of Ferenczi.
Rachman, a fourth generation analysand of Ferenczi (through Clara Thompson, Louis Wolberg, and Betty Feldman), has devoted the last twenty years to researching Ferenczi's life and work. This book is a well-written distillation of over fifty papers and presentations by Rachman. He covers not only Ferenczi's theories and techniques, but demonstrates how Ferenczi developed as a person and an analyst.
As an inquiring psychoanalyst, Rachman devotes considerable time to describing Ferenczi's early sociocultural environment, personal and family history and to dovetailing it with his development as student and physician. Ferenczi's complex relationship with Freud is spelled out in fascinating detail, from the initial mutual idealization to the heart wrenching rupture. The roles of Jung, Rank, Groddeck, the members of the “Committee” and others are examined, especially that of Ernest Jones, who pathologized, demonized, and censored Ferenczi's work. In what is one of psychoanalysis's darkest and most dramatic moments, Freud and Jones prevented the publication of Ferenczi's pivotal “Confusion of Tongues,” which Ferenczi had presented at the Wiesbaden Congress in 1932. Ferenczi's innovations and deviations from Freud's theories were interpreted as pathological regression and psychotic deterioration. Rachman, in passionate tone and scholarly detail, sets the record straight. Those close to Ferenczi attested to his clinical genius, success with narcissistic conditions, need for approval by Freud, Freud's rejection, Ferenczi's isolation in Budapest, and his freeing himself from Freud's binding yoke. The circumstances of Ferenczi's death are demystified by Rachman, who argues for the effects of