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With the publication in 1988 of Ferenczi's Clinical Diary, psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians gained access to a long-hidden treasure chest that held the findings of Ferenczi's unique and daring clinical experiments and the final recordings of the widsom that came with his maturity and clinical experience. The diary, written in 1932, had not been translated or published for many decades because it was felt that it would be “misunderstood” without access to the Freud-Ferenczi letters. This rich correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi has just begun to be translated into English, and it may be years before even the first volume will appear. While the diary may have been suppressed with the best of intentions, to protect Ferenczi's reputation, and while it may very well have been misunderstood if released prematurely, we will never know the impact that the diary might have had on the psychoanalytic world if it had been available earlier. Unfortunately, Ferenczi died before he had a chance to complete and publish the findings of his experiments. (Wolstein, 1991, has written similarly regarding the delayed publication of the diary.)
What has become clear with the Clinical Diary is that Ferenczi anticipated many of the controversies still being debated by clinical psychoanalysts and that he experimented with radical modifications of psychoanalytic technique in the effort to analyze the most difficult cases. Ferenczi's attempt at mutual analysis was designed to enlist the patient's