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There were, in fact, not one but two founders of psychoanalysis. What is “hot” and current in psychoanalysis today draws not on Freud, but on Ferenczi. All the major issues now engaging psychoanalysis were initially developed by Ferenczi 80 years ago and explored in his intimate relationship with Freud: whether analysis is a one-person or two-person emotional field; clinical detachment versus awareness of the analyst's contribution to the psychoanalytic encounter; emotional boundaries as against intersubjectivity; neutrality as opposed to the analyst's self-disclosure; the abstinence of “classical” clinical technique as contrasted with engagement and interpersonal activity; the analyst's incognito and its alternative, self-revelation.
Ferenczi has been called the “romantic,” as opposed to the “classic,” among psychoanalysts (Lorand, 1966/1995, p. 24; Strenger, 1989, p. 593). Freud is pictured as the cool “scientist,” and Ferenczi the warm “healer” of psychoanalysis or, as Axel Hoffer (1991) puts the polarities, “between the heart and the mind, passion and reason, indulgence and frustration, mother and father, and, finally, female and male” (p. 469). Hoffer suggests that Freud had an “unmistakable love and deep admiration for Ferenczi,” that he internalized Ferenczi, who “served as Freud's alterego, with Ferenczi representing the passionate and unrestrained side of Freud's personality” (p. 465, n. 1). Freud was the father and Ferenczi, “his irrepressible soul-mate” (p. 469), the mother of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi was in three intermittent periods of analyses