Book excerpt: This book is an indispensable work for anyone interested in the pioneering psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. As the supervisor of the recently published correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi, Haynal brings to the present volume an elegant scholarship sensitive to Ferenczi's time and intellectual milieu. This is not solely a study in the history of psychoanalysis, in that Haynal sets himself the aim of entering into a 'dialogue' with Ferenzi, 'the founder of all relationship-based psychoanalysis and the explorer of traumatisms, counter transference and other problems present even in contemporary psychoanalysis'. Expressed in a lucid and eloquent style, each chapter explores with an intimate incisiveness, not only Ferenczi's complex and difficult relationship with Freud, but the emergence and elaboration of original ideas anticipatory of subsequent developments within the psychoanalytic movement.