Sándor Ferenczi

Hungarian psychoanalyst (1873–1933), for two decades Freud's closest collaborator and, at the end, the most searching critic of analysis from inside it. A physician in Budapest with an early interest in hypnosis and in the neurology of the poor, he met Freud in 1908, travelled with him and Jung to Clark University in 1909, founded the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society in 1913 and was elected president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1918.

His theoretical work ranged from the mechanism of introjection, a term he coined, to the speculative biology of Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924), which read the sexual act as a return to the sea. What distinguishes him, however, is his clinical restlessness: dissatisfied with patients who improved slowly or not at all, he tried in succession an active technique that imposed tasks and prohibitions, then its opposite, a principle of relaxation and indulgence, and finally the mutual analysis recorded in the Clinical Diary he kept in 1932, in which analyst and patient took turns on the couch.

The paper he read at the Wiesbaden congress that year, Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child, returned to what Freud had set aside: that the accounts patients gave of sexual violence in childhood were often true, that the child's language of tenderness and the adult's language of passion are not the same, and that the analyst's own coldness or hypocrisy is felt and repeats the original injury.

The paper cost him Freud's confidence and, for half a century, his standing; the Diary was published only in 1985. Melanie Klein, Michael Balint and Clara Thompson were analysed or trained by him, and relational and intersubjective psychoanalysis now count him among their founders.