This book explores how the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis took shape and examines the role played in it by Sandor Ferenczi. It integrates the Hungarian story of the "exile of the Budapest School" with an American perspective on "solidarity in the psychoanalytic movement during the Nazi years".

Sándor Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn—the patient known as R.N. in the Clinical Diary—is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. In his latest groundbreaking work, Peter L. Rudnytsky draws on a trove of archival sources to provide a definitive scholarly account of this experiment, which constitutes a paradigm for relational psychoanalysis, as Freud’s self-analysis does for classical psychoanalysis. In Part 1, Rudnytsky tells the story of Severn’s life and traces the unfolding of her ideas, culminating in The Discovery of the Self. He shows how her book contains disguised case histories not only of Ferenczi and Severn herself—and thereby forms an indispensable companion volume to Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary—but also of Severn’s daughter Margaret, an internationally acclaimed dancer whose history of childhood sexual abuse uncannily replicated Severn’s own. Part 2 compares Severn to Clara Thompson and Izette de Forest as transmitters of Ferenczi’s legacy, sets the record straight about Ferenczi’s final illness, and reveals how Severn went beyond Freud and Groddeck in her capacity as Ferenczi’s analyst. Finally, in Part 3, Rudnytsky delineates the contrast between Freud and Ferenczi as men and thinkers and makes it clear why he agrees with Erich Fromm that Ferenczi’s example demonstrates how Freud’s attitude need not be that of all analysts. The first comprehensive study of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Severn, this book is a profound reexamination of Ferenczi’s relationship to Freud and an impassioned defense of Severn and Ferenczi’s views on the nature and treatment of trauma. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, especially to relational analysts, self psychologists, and trauma theorists.

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Rudnytsky explores the dialectical interplay between literature and psychoanalysis by reading key psychoanalytic texts in a variety of genres.

The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi provides a concise yet thorough overview of the life and work of Sandor Ferenczi. It seeks to help make his thought and work better known, as a controversial pioneering psychoanalyst whose importance to psychoanalysis has sometimes been wrongfully neglected and relegated to backstage. Including excerpts from his most important papers, this book gives the reader a clear guide to the major tenets of Ferenczi’s work, the psychoanalytic context in which his significant achievements occurred, and the continued importance of his work for contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Thierry Bokanowski examines Ferenczi’s work in three main stages: 1. A first period of contribution to Freud’s work (1908-1914) 2. A second period of the deployment of Ferenczi’s own thought and work (1914-1925) 3. A third period of calling concepts into question and advancing new concepts (1926-1933) Bokanowski offers a detailed analysis of these three periods, illustrating them vividly by analysing Ferenczi’s numerous and very famous articles or books during these periods in a way that allows his very original way of thinking to unfold. He then examines at the theoretical level the heritage of Ferenczi’s hypotheses developed across these three time spans. Covering Ferenczi’s relationship with Freud and with other early psychoanalysts, and his role in formulating well-established concepts such as introjection, countertransference and narcissistic splitting, The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi provides an essential and accessible read for any student or clinician of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy seeking to apply Ferenczi’s work in the present and understand the historical development of psychoanalytic ideas.

This book explores how the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis took shape and examines the role played in it by Sandor Ferenczi. It integrates the Hungarian story of the "exile of the Budapest School" with an American perspective on "solidarity in the psychoanalytic movement during the Nazi years".

A new theory of culture presented with a new method achieved by comparing closely the art and science in 20th century Austria and Hungary. Major achievements that have influenced the world like psychoanalysis, abstract art, quantum physics, Gestalt psychology, formal languages, vision theories, and the game theory etc. originated from these countries, and influence the world still today as a result of exile nurtured in the US. A source book with numerous photographs, images and diagrams, it opens up a nearly infinite horizon of knowledge that helps one to understand what is going on in today’s worlds of art and science.