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In this excellent book, Martin Stanton recommends study of Ferenczi on the grounds of his being one of the giants of the early psychoanalytic movement. The fact that he has been relatively little studied is attributed to a number of factors, including ‘character assassination’ by Ernest Jones, the assumption that Freud condemned his ‘active technique’, and the absence of a good, edited English translation of his work.
In the section entitled ‘Curriculum Vitae’, Stanton provides an historical background to Ferenczi's personal and professional development. The main body of the book describes Ferenczi's ideas. ‘Development’ can be considered as an analogy which displays Ferenczi's representation of the psychoanalytic process. The rest of the book is structure along the developmental lines of this analogy.
Firstly, there is an examination of how Ferenczi analyses time, and relates it to spatial progress. Then his ideas on transference are discussed, including the view that transference originates and progresses through play, this being linked with the inspiration of child analysis in Klein and Mahler. Ferenczi's views on child sex-abuse derive from his refusal to reduce the complex to the simple. Coitus, the declared aim of development, succeeds in Ferenczi's view at the level of continuation of the species, but fails to complete a return to primal unity.
Ferenczi criticises the over-valuation of theoretical insights to the detriment of ‘real, sincere sympathy’. That which the development analogy fails to convey Ferenczi