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From the "Active Technique" to the "Confusion of Tongues." A Study of Ferenczi's Technical Deviation. Béla Grunberger. Pp. 521-546.
In various ingenuous ways, analytic innovators such as Jung, Reich, Lacan, and Hartmann attempted to eliminate the "scandal" of Freudian thought in order to re-establish an earlier state of psychological science. Ferenczi, in contrast, maintained and developed this "scandal" to its ultimate extreme. Eventually, however, the path Ferenczi followed negated some aspects of infantile sexuality and attributed conflicts solely to external factors, which are the same difficulties found in other divergences from Freudian theory.
Grunberger views Ferenczi's deviance from the analytic rule of abstinence not so much as a general resistance to psychoanalytic theory but as an acting out of a transference neurosis. He attempts to place Ferenczi's analysis with Freud in the general context of Ferenczi's personal biography. Freud seems to have focused on a brother complex involving Ferenczi's many siblings and to have neglected the conflicts arising about his mother. The failure to analyze the negative transference (which was mentioned by Ferenczi himself) gives support to Grunberger's thesis that Ferenczi could not tolerate the negative transference when it occurred in his patients and thus resorted to an active technique of gratification. This led Ferenczi to accept his patients' complaints of indifference, coldness, and professional hypocrisy as real problems rather than as transferential. He then tried to resolve conflicts which had apparently occurred in his analysis with Freud. His early analytic writings, prior to the contact with Freud, are works of sublimation and are of great importance in the development of psychoanalytic theory. Following his analysis with Freud, the unresolved transference seems to have compromised Ferenczi's work and to have led to his technical divergences.