Sándor Ferenczi

A Hungarian psychoanalyst and one of Freud's closest early collaborators, Ferenczi broke from orthodox technique by arguing the analyst should engage warmly and even disclose something of themselves rather than remain a blank screen — a stance now recognized as an ancestor of modern relational therapy. He split from Freud over his conviction that patients' accounts of childhood sexual abuse should be believed rather than dismissed as fantasy, a disagreement that damaged his reputation for decades until his papers were reassessed.