ABSTRACT
Since the posthumous publication in English of his Diary in 1988, there has been a growing appreciation of the ways in which Ferenczi’s clinical investigations have had a profound impact on psychoanalytic thought and practice. Developments in the relational theory of technique, especially with regard to our views and uses of countertransference phenomena, bear the unmistakable imprint of Ferenczi’s discoveries. His work offered a profound counterpoint in the therapist’s uses of the self to approaches associated with classical traditions (Bass, 2015). Ferenczi began his Diary with a sharp critique of how analysis was practiced at that time:
Mannered form of greeting, formal request to “tell everything,” so-called free-floating attention, which ultimately amounts to no attention at all, and which is certainly inadequate to the highly emotional character of the analysand’s communications … This has the following effects: (1) the patient is offended by the lack of interest … (2) since he does not want to think badly of us … he looks for cause of this lack of reaction in himself …
(Diary, p. 1)