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In 1990, when Martin Stanton's book was published, I would have needed to devote a large part of this review to providing both a biographical and a historical context for Ferenczi (1873-1933), who, although he was Freud's intimate and widely regarded as
Freud's “favorite disciple” from the time of their first meeting in 1908, remained the psychoanalytic pioneer that most of us knew about only second hand, through gossip, innuendo, and rumor. Without such a preface it would have been impossible to call appropriate attention to the “advance-guard” significance of Stanton's achievement. In 1990, it was scarcely more than a year since the English translation of Ferenczi's Clinical Diary had been published, and Stanton's was not only the first English-language examination of Ferenczi's total body of work, but the first to incorporate untranslated or yet-to-be published materials into a scholarly and comprehensive consideration of Ferenczi's “text.” The importance of such a substantial work's having been produced about Ferenczi and of Stanton for doing it could scarcely be overestimated. In 1990, the scope of Ferenczi's influence was one of psychoanalysis' best kept secrets. (In 1995, outside of a small number of Ferenczi enthusiasts, it arguably still is.)
Five years ago, I would have pointed out how usefully Stanton's detailed chronology of Ferenczi's life (in the first part of the book, entitled “Curriculum Vitae” builds on and enhances the biographical material that André Haynal (1988) presented just two years earlier. Today, while some omissions can be noted that have become more important in the interval (e.g., the absence from the “Curriculum Vitae” of the 1910 Palermo episode, the first eruption of the power dynamic between Freud and Ferenczi that would fuel the development of controversy between the two and that was deeply linked to Ferenczi's personal and political outlook) I will say afresh that Stanton's sensitive reading of Ferenczi continues to command inter