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Freud May have been one of those who “disturbed the sleep of the world” (Freud, 1914), but it was Ferenczi who disturbed the sleep of the analytic community. While Freud originated the Oedipal theory as a psychoanalytic developmental drama, Ferenczi rendered conscious the oedipal drama within the analytic community by posing a cardinal question: With whom would they align—the captives or the kings? Would they intrepidly investigate and empathically identify with their patients' vulnerabilities, or would they impassively identify with the aggressors and refer to their patients' traumas as childhood fantasies?
Ferenczi unambiguously cast himself on the side of the patient, referring to the therapeutic process as one where both sides abdicate “authority … they give the impression of two equally terrified children who compare their experiences, and because of their common fate understand each other completely and instinctively try to comfort each other” (Ferenczi, 1988, p. 56). Ferenczi, out of this alignment with his patients, went further than merely appreciating and validating their unique trauma-begotten insights into the real person of their analyst, who is a flawed person (Ferenczi, 1932, 1988). He experimented with the parameters of the psychoanalytic setting to forge mutual analyses with his patients.
Ferenczi's experiments with mutual analysis may have been influenced in part out of his personal difficulties with Freud. He never