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This book is the meeting ground of several distinct traditions of scholarship on the life and work of Sándor Ferenczi. Bringing together psychoanalysts from around the world, this work aims to further our understanding of Ferenczi's clinical and theoretical contributions. In the writings of contemporary scholars, Ferenczi emerges as a complex figure-hero, flawed hero, man of excesses, courageous innovator, “enfant terrible,” dissident, passionate follower and friend of classical analysis and of Freud. In some lights, he was the prescient innovator of all modern trends, champion of egalitarianism and mutuality, crusader for the recognition of child abuse and trauma. For others, he was the precursor of relational developments in psychoanalysis, sowing the fascinating seeds that have flowered and evolved within the main body of psychoanalytic thought.
Ferenczi's contributions to the early history of the psychoanalytic movement were second only to Freud's. He was a central organizer of the movement, a leading spokesperson and lecturer, and a theoretical and clinical contributor of the first rank. He founded the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Budapest Psychoanalytic Association; was the first Professor of Psychoanalysis at a university (University of Budapest); organized the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; and conducted what is considered to be the first training analysis (that of Jones in ). Freud (1937) himself memorialized Ferenczi as a “master of analysis” (p. 230) who “made all analysts into his pupils” (Freud, 1933, p. 228).
For decades, though, Sándor Ferenczi was dismissed by mainstream