The Technique at Issue: Controversies in Psychoanalysis from Freud and Ferenczi to Michael Balint. Andre Haynal. London:  Karnac, 1988,  xix + 202 pp.

This short, concise, and thoughtful volume by Andre Haynal, a former president of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and native of Hungary, merits careful reading and study.

Its main goal, in the author's words,

is to explore the development of psychoanalysis as a method, and the controversies such a development aroused within the group formed by its first practitioners…. This study begins with Freud's own practice of psychoanalysis and what he had to say about it, and goes on to retrace the controversy between Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi as well as Michael Balint, Ferenczi's main disciple and successor…. This study is limited to following one thread in the tapestry of psychoanalysis—that of the Budapest School.

Whether or not one agrees with all of the author's interpretations and conclusions, one can be grateful for the obvious commitment and devotion that has gone into this portrayal of the seminal influence of Sandor Ferenczi through his own ideas and his perhaps latent influence on others in the following generations of psychoanalysts. This work can be read with profit by anyone interested in the history of ideas in psychoanalysis.

Ferenczi's differences with Freud on technique, as Haynal sees them, stem ultimately from certain dichotomies in attitudes and thinking of the two. To Ferenczi technical progress would advance theory, whereas to Freud developments in theory would further technique. The one, Ferenczi, was motivated by a desire to cure; the other, Freud, remained committed to increasing scientific understanding through therapeutic work. In time, Ferenczi espoused the importance of the experiences of the analysand, while Freud continued to emphasize insight and interpretation in the analytic process.

Ferenczi moved in his therapeutic endeavors from the traditional classical approach, with its emphasis on abstinence and relative inactivity on the analyst's part, to his “active” technique and, finally, to his “experiments.” The last involved such feature