Ferenczi: the Father of the Empathic
Interpersonal Approach
By Marion Houghton, EdS, LMFT and Tom Johnson, LCSW, EdD
On September 16, 2014, a gathering of 18 CPPNJ members and guests welcomed CPPNJ
analyst Dr. William Lum to talk about Sandor Ferenczi—one of the pioneers in the history of
psychoanalysis. The meeting was hosted by Susan Gutwill at her home in Highland Park, and
was the first of this year’s meetings of the Central Region Group of CPPNJ
Bill described Ferenczi as a “tragic figure,” whose tragic experiences revolved around the loss of
his treasured friendship and colleagueship with Freud, as well as the loss of his early venerable
stature in the analytic world. Ferenczi met Freud in 1908, and quickly became Freud’s closest
friend and colleague. Over the course of his career, Ferenczi differentiated from Freud and
developed an alternate perspective on psychic reality in that he emphasized “actual facts”—the
reality of the child’s environment—as opposed to the intrapsychic focus that Freud emphasized
when he distanced himself from his earlier “seduction theory.” Ferenczi came to believe in the
reports of actual child trauma in his adult analytic patients. This set him far afield from the
dominant analytic perspective of the time which understood these reports as psychic reality and
fantasy. These conflicts about trauma and about analytic practice eventually led to a cutoff from
Freud after many years. The cutoff haunted much of his later clinical writing, and is particularly
evident in Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary. As Ferenczi experimented more and more boldly, typified by
his later-life practice of “mutual analysis, ” he became more and more exiled from the dominant
analytic community. However, Ferenczi’s ideas about practice prefigured many of the
developments in contemporary psychoanalysis seen in such Relational ideas as: the myth of
neutrality; mutuality and symmetry in the therapeutic relationship; the use of enactment; and
countertransference disclosure. Ferenczi’s work with trauma also prefigured many of our ideas
about dissociation and multiplicity. We can see the influence of Ferenczi’s ideas in the work of
Winnicott, Kohut, the Interpersonalists, and the British Object Relations School. Ferenczi also
served as an analyst for some of the influential thinkers in the analytic world: Melanie Klein,
Michael Balint, and Clara Thompson (who was sent to Ferenczi by Harry Stack Sullivan).
Bill also referred to Ferenczi as an “incurable charismatic” who kept “the child in himself alive”
and was sensitive to the “child in his patients”. His creativity, dedication and his intellectual
bravery led to his being seen as the therapist of last resort for many highly disturbed patients. It
was in this clinical work that he experimented with technique and developed many of his
groundbreaking perspectives on working deeply in the transference-countertransference matrix.
If we look at the history and development of Ferenczi’s ideas, we can see his ongoing dedication
to evaluation and innovation in clinical practice. The period from 1908 to 1919 is known as the
“active period” of Ferenczi’s professional life, in which he, like Freud, sought innovative “ways of
gaining access to inaccessible unconscious material” during treatment. Ferenczi said that the
analyst should actively intervene in stalemated cases through the use of “ commands,
prohibitions, and suggestions to deprive and frustrate the patient”. At the height of his
experimentation with this perspective, criticism of his technique by Freud and other analysts
caused Ferenczi to publicly renounce his methods and to re-align himself with Freud’s more
moderate approach, which prioritized slow and steady work in the transference.
The period from 1926-1932 is known as Ferenczi’s “period of indulgence”. He became
concerned with the quality of the analytic relationship, and addressed the problematic and
curative factors in analytic treatment. He formulated techniques particularly for patients with
severe psychodevelopmental deficits due to failures of early attachment provision or disruptive
early trauma. Ferenczi thought that an analyst should be, above all, empathic, flexible,
interpersonally sincere and open. These technical experiments included “mutual analysis” which
he later disavowed, after recognizing the confounding issues around boundaries and
confidentiality. However, in this later phase of his work he consistently maintained the
importance of the analyst engendering an environment facilitative of therapeutic regression in the
analytic space. Here his ideas are very consistent with Winnicott’s notion of the importance of
“regression to dependence” in the analytic relationship.
Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary was written over a period of eight months in the latest chapter of
Ferenczi’s professional life --1932—the year before he died. Dr. Lum reviewed the English
translation that was published by Harvard University Press in 1988. He says that the Diary shows
a “struggle with clinical issues such as abstinence vs. gratification, the therapeutic value of
regression and reliving in the transference, and the meaning of empathy and clinical neutrality.” It
was also in the Diary that Ferenczi noted observations about the re-emergence of traumatic
experience in the therapeutic relationship and noted phenomena that we now classify as
dissociation and multiplicity.
Dr. Lum paid tribute to Ferenczi by referring to him as the “Father of the Empathic, Interpersonal
Approach”. He invited us to read the soon-to-be-published letters between Freud and Ferenczi,
(of which there are over one thousand) as a way to appreciate the process of theory
development, differentiation, and resistance to differentiation in an analytic community.