You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The current volume, a sequel to The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (1993), is aptly subtitled “From Ghost to Ancestor,” describing as it does how much Ferenczi and his work have become fully part of our shared psychoanalytic history. It’s hard to imagine but, unlike most sequels, this volume exceeds the imagination and generativity of the first edited book. In part this is because that first volume, and the conference it was based on, successfully ushered in a renaissance of interest in Ferenczi. Since its publication, there have been more than 12 books focused on Ferenczi published in English (many more in other languages), as well as numerous reissues of his collected papers, correspondence, and more than 250 articles in psychoanalytic journals. Like its predecessor, the current volume includes both wonderful investigative sleuthing and contemporary expansions of the clinical and theoretical contributions of Ferenczi. It further cements Ferenczi’s place as the original relational psychoanalyst and underscores the trauma of his dismissal from the analytic canon for more than 50 years.
The Sandor Ferenczi Society, founded in 1988 in Budapest, has been joined by societies in several countries that are now linked in an International Ferenczi Network. There are annual conferences and issues of psychoanalytic journals devoted to his work, and wide-scale acceptance of his significance in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The current volume reflects not only the richness of Ferenczian scholarship but also the changes in theory and practice of psychoanalysis over the last two decades. Many of these changes, including the acknowledgment of the frequency of sexual and physical abuse in children
and the growing acceptance and appreciation of the real impact of the analyst on the analytic encounter in what Ferenczi called an unconscious dialogue, were still quite controversial in 1993. As Anthony Bass noted in the prese