The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: The Origin of a Two-Person Psychology and Emphatic Perspective. Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series, Edited by Arnold W. Rachman,  Routledge, London and New York, 2016,  222 pp.

Here is the extent of my knowledge (admittedly, not accurate) about Ferenczi before my reading The Budapest School: He was Hungarian and a disciple of Freud's, one of many Hungarians who shared a fundamentally orthodox psychoanalytic perspective during the first decades of the 20th century.

Here is a brief synopsis of what I now understand about Ferenczi and the Budapest School of psychoanalysis after my reading of this scholarly, albeit inconsistent collection of papers:

Ferenczi was indeed Hungarian and an early, devoted disciple of Sigmund Freud. Their relationship, however, was much more complex and conflicted, with Ferenczi diverging from Freudian orthodoxy in a number of critical areas, notably the role of actual, not imagined, sexual trauma in childhood. Ferenczi was himself a prolific writer, leaving behind a rich legacy of clinical and theoretical papers that have informed interpersonalists and have left indelible influences on followers of Lacan, Balint, and others. At one time Ferenczi fell victim to the passionate, protectionist infighting of the rigidly orthodox, even once being dismissed by Ernst Jones as delusionally psychotic. His legacy persists to the present, as reflected by this collection of ten papers by nine different authors in this slim but concentrated volume.

The goal of this volume is to assert the existence and relevance of the Budapest School—a community of analytic practitioners and theorists