Sándor Ferenczi (7 July 1873 – 22 May 1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.

Prior to this conclusion he was notable as a psychoanalyst for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual for psychoanalytic practice.

[1] Ferenczi has found some favour in modern times among the followers of Jacques Lacan as well as among relational psychoanalysts in the United States.

Though desperately ill with the then-untreatable disease, Ferenczi managed to deliver his most famous paper, "Confusion of Tongues"[2] to the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany, on 4 September 1932.

For example, instead of the relative "passivity" of a listening analyst encouraging the patient to freely associate, Ferenczi used to curtail certain responses, verbal and non-verbal alike, on the part of the analysand so as to allow suppressed thoughts and feelings to emerge.

If the more traditional opinion was that the analyst had the role of a physician, administering a treatment to the patient based upon diagnostic judgment of psychopathology, Ferenczi wanted the analysand to become a co-participant in an encounter created by the therapeutic dyad.

Ferenczi believed that the persistent traumatic effect of chronic overstimulation, deprivation, or empathic failure (a term further elaborated by Heinz Kohut) during childhood is what causes neurotic, character, borderline and psychotic disorders.

[12][13] This idea of an "uterine and thalassal regression"[14] became a feature of the so-called Budapest School, up to the disciple Michael Balint and his 1937 paper on "Primary [Object-]Love".

Far from simply leaning on Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche, and post-Lamarckism to bolster the psychoanalytic paradigm, Ferenczi defamiliarizes these popular discourses just at a time when they were starting to inform eugenicist projects.