Introduction

Part IV explores applications and extensions of Ferenczi’s ideas beyond individual patients and the consulting room. We start in the political realm, first with Eszter Salgó, a scholar of both international relations and psychoanalysis. Salgó informs us that Ferenczi understood that social structures reflect human nature, and that psychoanalysts, therefore, are well positioned to point the way toward a healthier social order. And he saw personal liberation through psychoanalytic treatment as a bulwark that could prevent authoritarianism from taking hold. Indeed, Ferenczi organized the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society along democratic lines, in contrast—and perhaps implicitly as a criticism—of authoritarianism both within the psychoanalytic world and in the Hungarian government after the First World War.