Ferenczi’s Ethics for Our Time: The Possibility of Being Alongside

Ferenczi’s practice and therapeutic ethics as exemplified in the Clinical Diary reveal a profound sensitivity to the questions of authority and freedom. This paper will engage with the ways in which these questions have been taken up elsewhere and have become central to post-war extensions of the psychoanalytic field, such as group analysis. A particular comparison will be made with group analytic notions of leadership and horizontal ways of relating, that is, how to be alongside one another. It will be suggested that the translatability of Ferenczi for our time reveals the adaptability of psychoanalysis to different and changing socio-political contexts.