ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the particular “closeness of soul” that goes through S. Ferenczi’s and D. W. Winnicott’s thinking: a closeness which has remained unobserved for a long time by the psychoanalytic community, or which at least has not been fully grasped. It highlights why Ferenczi is the “introjective psychoanalyst” par excellence in the history of psychoanalysis. The chapter explores and discusses a number of crucial theoretical and clinical issues that, throughout Ferenczi’s life and works, shaped his development in this direction. It focuses on Ferenczi’s early and late writings. The chapter illustrates more clearly the development of his “introjective” analytic style, leaving for another time the equally interesting subject of the evolution of Ferenczi’s ideas on the phenomena of imitation, incorporation, and identification that follow the process of introjection. It explores the final developments of the brilliant intuitions Ferenczi had as a “young psychoanalyst”, and as a preamble to the author's conclusions on Ferenczi as an eminently “introjective analyst”.
