Ferenczi in Our Contemporary World

Why Ferenczi today? This question formed the title of a special issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis in 2004. This is only one example of the many periodicals, books, and papers published on the legacy of Ferenczi over the last twenty years. By now, Ferenczi’s main theoretical and therapeutic initiatives have been discovered/rediscovered and integrated into the mainstream of the contemporary theoretical and therapeutic knowledge of psychoanalysis, from countertransference as an indispensable contribution to the dynamic of the psychotherapeutic process or from the essential importance of the early object relationship between mother and child to his paradigm shift in trauma theory (Mészáros 2002).

What attracts us to Ferenczi? What does he represent that has been bringing clinicians and academics from various scholarly fields together for decades? What is that glue/essence that we find for ourselves in the oeuvre of this man who was both an enfant terrible and a wise baby at the same time, who created the Budapest School, a school with no walls, no director, and no students in a formal sense. The man who did not like institutional structures, but, having recognized their inescapable necessity, he initiated, at Freud’s suggestion, the establishment of organizations—among them the IPA [International Psychoanalytical Association] more than 100 years ago—which continues to operate to the present day? What is it in the conflict-burdened world of the 21st century that provides us with points of connection to Ferenczi, a common way of thinking among professionals who live in a variety of cultures and political systems throughout the world?

What is it in Ferenczi’s personality and way of thinking that smoothes the way for contemporaries to connect to psychoanalysis and to Ferenczi now, just as they did in the past? By now, it is thanks to the tireless work of research, publishing, and education on the part of so many colleagues that a real Ferenczi Renaissance ha