Background
He was born on July 7, 1873 in Miskolc, Austria-Hungary.
He was born on July 7, 1873 in Miskolc, Austria-Hungary.
Educated at the universities of Budapest and Vienna, he served for a time as an army doctor. His primary interest was hypnosis.
He began practicing psychiatry and neurology in Budapest in 1900. He first met Sigmund Freud in 1908 and became a close friend and correspondent; they exchanged over one thousand letters. As a senior member of Freud’s group, he went to the United States with Freud in 1909 and became a central figure of the psychoanalytic movement, lectured on the subject, and was an outstanding therapist.
His pioneer works on psychosexual disturbances and on active and passive homosexuality and its relation to paranoia were published in 1908 and 1911 respectively.
In 1913 he published Entwicklungsstufen des Wircklichkeitssinnes(“Stages of Development in the Perception of Reality”), a classic in the field based on his observation and analysis of children, which describes the child’s view of his own omnipotence and sense of reality.
"Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis" (1926) comprises elaboration and systematization of his technique and clinical essays including those on hysteria and tics.
Ferenczi was the first to stress the paramount importance of loving physical contact with the mother for the development of the child and the dangers inherent in too-active stimulation of the infant by adults. In his latter years, there was a growing distance between him and Freud, whose sharp criticism of Ferenczi’s theories and technique, along with his own failure to produce the expected results, caused Ferenczi to revise some of his theories by 1931.
Nevertheless, his ideas on the early development of the child’s personality and the hidden functions of the ego have influenced analysts, prompted discussion, and resulted in new theories. Ferenczi was appointed a professor at the University of Budapest in 1918 but because of his Jewish origin his chair was abolished after the fall of the proletarian dictatorship in 1919.
From 1909 to 1914 he was an active supporter of the Galileo Circle, a group composed mainly of radical Jewish intellectuals, who later formed the Radical party of Hungary.