Sándor Ferenczi



Sándor Ferenczi (July 7, 1873 – May 22, 1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst.

Born Sándor Fraenkel in Miskolc, Hungary, to Baruch Fraenkel, a Polish-Jewish man from Kraków, and Rosa Eibenschutz, from a Polish-Jewish family that settled in Vienna. Sandor magyarized his name to Ferenczi. In his works he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This, among other reasons, resulted in a break with Sigmund Freud. He was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1918 to 1919.

Prior to this break he was a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis and was notable for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual in psychoanalytic practice. He has found some favor in modern times among the followers of Jacques Lacan as well as among relational psychoanalysts in the United States. Relational analysts read Ferenczi as anticipating their own clinical emphasis on mutuality (intimacy), intersubjectivity, and the importance of the analyst's countertransference.

Ferenczi's work has strongly influenced theory and praxis within the interpersonal-relational movement in American psychoanalysis, as typified by psychoanalysts at the William Alanson White Institute.