ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Sandor Ferenczi’s views on technique and the therapeutic interaction, drawing out the conceptual links between him and members of the British Independent School, in the expectation that it will allow for a better understanding of the effects of Winnicott’s own therapeutic attitude. Both Ferenczi and D. W. Winnicott were practitioners widely considered to have had a strong clinical flair and a willingness to take creative risks. This chapter argues that an inquiry into the work of the Independent group sheds a new light on the paradox of psychoanalytic knowledge and its distribution between patient and analyst, pertaining, as Ferenczi saw it, to the dynamic of power between them. Ferenczi’s writings on the analyst’s role provide the transitional link between Sigmund Freud’s tentative remarks about countertransference in his papers on technique and the preoccupations of the British Independents. Ferenczi’s was an idiosyncratic and fertile imagination that led him to a wide range of clinical and theoretical topics.
