Sándor Ferenczi – sincerity and freedom in psychoanalysis

Abstract

With his theoretical and clinical contributions, operating as a central organiser of the movement, a leading spokesperson and lecturer, Sándor Ferenczi, a psychoanalyst of the first generation, con­tributed significantly to the development of the psychoanalytic movement in its earliest stages. Ferenczi’s pioneering theoretical and clinical ideas represent an important base for both British object-relations theory and self psychology, as well as the American interpersonal and intersubjective approaches. He developed a theory of genitality and placed particular emphasis on the importance of trauma, the therapeutic value of regression, experiments with mutual analysis, negative transference, countertransference, intimacy in the analytic situation, and the patient's own perspective. His concepts such as the identification with the aggressor, holding environment, corrective emotional experience and fragmented self were later taken up and developed further by many authors, including Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott, Franz Alexander and Heinz Kohut. According to Michael Balint the Freud-Ferenczi controversy acted as a trauma on the analyti­cal world, and we can say that the working-through of it began around fifty years after Ferenczi’s death.