ABSTRACT
Balint wrote that “Ferenczi never forgot that psychoanalysis was really discovered by a patient” (1957, p. 238), and this chapter turns to the patients, who, lying on Ferenczi’s couch in Budapest, helped him discover and advance new ideas in theory and technique. Ferenczi’s various experiments and pioneering work were always a response to his patients, and often to particular impasses in treatment. Sandor Lorand quotes him as saying that he took the “driedup difficult cases whom no one else wanted to work with” (in Alexander et al., 1966, p. 22). This chapter gives an overview of Ferenczi’s patients, some who have occupied centre-stage in contemporary discussions of Ferenczi’s ideas of trauma or mutual analysis, and others who have remained only footnotes, initials, or even nameless. My research has focused on his American pupils and the identities of the eight patients who appear in The Clinical Diary and Notes and Fragments, many who were previously only known by initials that concealed their identities (Brennan, 2015a).
