Kissing Cure

• The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson
  Harvard, 227 pp, £23.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 674 13526 1

It was Freud’s dubious privilege to attract endangered personalities. Possibly the most gifted, almost definitely the most interesting of these was Sandor Ferenczi; and the publication of a clinical journal he kept during most of 1932, the year before his death, allows the public interested in such matters to assess, far better than before, the range of his professional gifts and the depth of his psychological vulnerability. The English translation is fluent; the editing, though at times partisan, is helpful. This is a welcome addition to the growing number of significant texts illuminating the history of psychoanalysis.