The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi: Edited by Judith Dupont. Translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1988. 227 pp.

Sándor Ferenczi died of pernicious anemia on May 22, 1933, shortly before his sixtieth birthday. During the last ten months of his life, he kept a clinical diary. In 1969, Michael Balint transcribed it, provided footnotes, translated the diary into English, and censored several paragraphs, including Ferenczi's opinion about

Freud. Believing publication of the diary, as well as of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence to be "imminent," he drafted an Introduction and a Preface. These are included at the end of this English edition of the diary, which was finally published, uncensored, in 1988. It was edited by Judith Dupont, who provided her own enlightening Introduction and footnotes. The correspondence is in publication and may be available by the time this book review appears.

The diary chronicles Freenczi's daily work and contains personal history as well as comments on technique, psychoanalytic theory, and the conflicted relationship with Freud. On some days, Ferenczi made two or three passionate entries. Upon occasion, several days of silence elapsed, or the entries were fragmentary and disorganized. One can imagine times of illness and low energy alternating with times of feverish activity. The uneven quality and discontinuity of some of the entries, as well as the "brainstorming" nature of many, make parts of this diary difficult to follow. The footnotes help clarify the more cryptic entries, add a historical perspective, and tie the ideas presented in the diary to Ferenczi's last, most controversial papers. Perhaps, had he lived, Ferenczi would have organized his manuscript into a more coherent expression of his ideas. Nevertheless, the diary is of great interest not only to those who value insights into the relationships, personalities, and struggles of both Ferenczi and Freud, but also as a commentary on the controversial issues both of their time and of ours.

In the first entry, on January 7, 1932, Ferenczi expresses concern that the rule to free