ABSTRACT
S. Ferenczi noted that activity worked "against the grain", that is to say, against the pleasure principle. S. Freud had been forced into initiating an active framework to end the analysis of the Wolf Man. Ferenczi argued that active technique was not a return to banal suggestion or cathartic abreaction: "The provoking of an opposition by activity disturbs to no small degree the comfortable but torpid quiet of a stagnating analysis". Ferenczi was concerned with authenticity in the clinical relationship, even when it meant understanding the requirement for dissent. Freud wrote pessimistically in regard to the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis whilst at the time knowing of his great difficulty in speaking due to cancer and the debilitating effect of his prosthesis, which Anna had to help him put in and remove daily. Treatment for his cancer was failing and clinical analysis was profoundly difficult for him to be able to manage.
