ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the extraordinary figure of Ferenczi, his passionate affective investment in Freud, his curious and creative mind. He was in fact the teacher of many great psychoanalysts, from Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and even Bion, to the British independents, Balint and Winnicott, and a number of American analysts like Clara Thompson, K Horney, H S Sullivan, E Fromm, and F Fromm Reichmann, at the origin of modern intersubjective psychoanalysis. But it was only in the fifties that Ferenczi’s “theory of counter-transference,” with its rich vein of innovation, flowed back into the mainstream and found its original place in dialogue with Freud’s “theory of transference.”
In Ferenczi’s case, too, the topic of his first scientific article was spiritualism, but unlike Jung’s, it was entirely devoid of mysticism. Ferenczi intuited that in these experiences, a mechanism of Ego fragmentation was present: he thought that the greater part of spiritualist phenomena was based on the same simple or multiple split in mental functioning.
The encounter with Freud was a postponed transferential appointment: because of his resistance to the impetuosity of his deepest emotions, initially he felt a great aversion for the theory of the sexual origin of the neuroses.
