ABSTRACT
Andre Haynal, a Hungarian who has been a professor of psychiatry in Geneva and also regularly comes to teach at Stanford Medical School, California, has written an excellent overview of the story of the Budapest school of psychoanalysis. While Sandor Ferenczi's path-breaking innovations are now widely appreciated among practicing analysts, Freud's own private judgment that Ferenczi's late technical recommendations meant that Ferenczi had become psychotic got widely circulated in Jones's popular authorized biography of Freud. Yet the full extent to which Ferenczi's contributions anticipated later liberal trends in psychoanalytic thinking deserves the emphasis Haynal gives it; otherwise the substance of Ferenczi's clinical thought may get reproduced without adequately acknowledging the credit Ferenczi deserves for those achievements. The whole story of the Budapest school, under what principles it arose and how it compared with the more standard approach advocated by Freud's orthodox followers, makes a fascinating tale.
