Prologue

The Early Days of Psychoanalysis Involved Years of Struggle with issues of power and authority, boundary confusion, and transgression. Many early analysts were directing the affairs of their patients with unwarranted assumptions of authority, and quite a few were having affairs with their patients as well. Although sexual violations occurred often enough in these fervent years, more pervasive, and in my view at least as destructive, was the analyst's adoption of a stance of omniscience. Struggling to assert the scientific legitimacy of psychoanalysis, analysts claimed to be the only reliable judges of their patients'resistances and idealizations. Patients who refused their interpretations were urged to submit and accommodate to their analyst's theories, or else be shunned as pathological and unanalyzable.

Through the swirls and eddies of this early turbulence, Ferenczi set his sights less on Freud's project of creating an accurate and detailed map of the psyche, and more on the understanding and relief of suffering, by means of the doctor/patient, analyst/analysand relationship. Apparently, he never worked harder toward that end than in the case of RN, or Elizabeth Severn (DuPont, 1988). Ferenczi's harrowing account of his mutual analysis with Severn, in which he and his patient alternated and reversed roles, is probably the most daring, poignant, and frightening example we have of relational psychoanalysis, at and beyond the often ambiguous border between the personal and the professional. In laying bare his psyche and deconstructing his claims to objectivity and authority, Ferenczi told a great truth with which psychoanalysts had been struggling and continue to struggle: we are never fully analyzed, never fully conscious, never omniscient, and always fallible. In my view, this recognition of Ferenczi's, and his willingness to openly allow for the fallibility that many of his peers were anxious