Epilogue

Our mission in this special issue, honoring Sándor Ferenczi, was to acquaint the present generation of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts with his theory and method because his work had been suppressed and removed from mainstream psychoanalysis (Rachman, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1997). His ideas and methods, particularly of his last clinical period, profoundly disturbed Freud and the analytic community and contributed to a trauma (Balint, 1968) that lasted from his last presentation, “The Confusion of Tongues” (Ferenczi, 1933) until about the early 1980s (Rachman, 1997). During the 50-year period, generations of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts were deprived of his contributions, since they were not taught either in traditional analytic or alternative institutes (Rachman, 1997). Because his ideas were so clinically sound, they found their way into the major dissident frameworks of psychoanalysis, such as object relations, interpersonal psychoanalysis, and self psychology. Because his humanistic method was considered “not psychoanalysis,” his ideas could not be openly acknowledged without facing rejection by the analytic establishment. Nevertheless, these contributions were of such a magnitude that eventually they would be rediscovered when the climate in psychoanalysis was less oppressive and when the limitations of orthodoxy became inescapable. For example, the concept of empathy, which Ferenczi introduced into psychoanalysis in 1928 (Ferenczi, 1928), was lost to mainstream psychoanalysis. Various psychoanalytic dissidents who came after Ferenczi (first Sullivan, then Winnicott, and finally Kohut) found that empathy was central to their clinical work. Now, empathy is well established in liberal psychoanalysis, but Ferenczi's contributions are rarely mentioned (Rachman, 1988).

Ferenczi's role in the history of psychoanalysis brings to the foreground many neglected aspects of psychoanalytic inquiry. Issues of power, control, and status so evident in the sufferin