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.
In contrast to Adler or Jung, who both created therapeutic schools that seceded from psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the first psychoanalytic dissident—the lifelong leader of a loyal opposition (see Gedo, 1986, especially chapters 3 and 9). Contemporary enthusiasts for his work (e.g., Haynal, 1989) go so far as to claim that most subsequent dissidents, such as Kohut, or the English “middle group,” for instance, are in actuality perpetuating Ferenczi's ideas or procedures. Although any position of loyal opposition within psychoanalysis does belong in the tradition initiated by Ferenczi, in my opinion some contributors have espoused dissident positions without being directly influenced by him. His true intellectual heirs might be called the “Budapest school,” although the tragic recent history of Hungary has driven many of them into exile.
By far the most prominent of these exiles was Michael Bálint, whose activities in England did have some influences on the London “middle group,” as Haynal recounts. Bálint never ceased his advocacy of Ferenczi's valuable contributions, particularly with regard to analytic technique. He summarized the most important of Ferenczi's emphases as follows:
the immense therapeutic value of regression in the analytic situation, provided it is properly handled; [the] overriding importance of transference interpretations as compared with anything else that the analyst may do; the influence of the analyst's “professional hypocrisy” in the developing transference relationship and, with it, the need for absolute sincerity to the extent of the use of what is nowadays called countertransference interpretations; the dangers of driving the patient by consistently adhering to … objective passivity into a repetition of the original pathogenic trauma. (Bálint, 1967, p. 148)