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It has been ninety years since Sándor Ferenczi died and yet even in death his writings continue to touch so many of us. His legacy can be detected—even when not fully acknowledged—in everyday clinical concepts like empathy, introjection, embodiment, dissociation, multiple self-states, and, of course, countertransference—all widely accepted ideas that were originally dismissed by many of his colleagues, not least of whom was Freud. These days references to Ferenczi’s work can be found everywhere. One might reasonably wonder if there is much more to say. Arnold Rachman and Clara Mucci, authors of Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma: A Relational Neurobiological Perspective, clearly think so and they have written a book that helps to shed further light on this gifted, intuitive, and, at times, misunderstood psychoanalytic thinker.
Divided into nineteen chapters—with a great deal of overlap in those authored by Rachman—this book traces Ferenczi’s pioneering work treating trauma survivors; Ferenczi’s inevitable break with Freud over the former’s theoretical and technical innovations; and more recently his resurrection as a psychoanalytic visionary, now vindicated by current neurobiological research. The first twelve chapters of this book are authored by Rachman, whose work will be familiar to many English speakers. His biography of Ferenczi1 was one of the first to appear in English and he has subsequently published dozens of papers on Ferenczi’s various contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique, many of which appear to be repurposed for this book.