ABSTRACT
To juxtapose Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Minna Bernays and Sandor Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary might well be described as a metaphysical conceit in Dr. S. Johnson’s famous pejorative definition of such comparisons as “the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”. Ferenczi’s dismissal in 1912 of his awareness of the true nature of Freud’s relationship with Minna Bernays as “only an infantile thought” is the effect of the phantom “transmitted unknowingly, and without ever being explicitly stated directly from the parent into the unconscious of the child”. The chapter examines the image of Freud fashioned by the Hungarian disciple who has become an inspirational figure for contemporary relational and independent analysts. In an extensive entry on 31 March 1932 about mutual analysis, Ferenczi addresses the complications that can ensue when an analyst enters into such an arrangement with a patient who is himself an analyst, and who then chooses to repeat the experiment with his own patients.
