Ferenczi's Language of Tenderness: Working with Disturbances from the Earliest Years

Ferenczi identified the presence of a child in every analysis or therapy and distinguished between the languages of tenderness and passion in their appropriateness for such work. Using Ferenczi's insights, Robert W. Rentoul draws on and integrates the subsequent work of the British Independents and recent American writers in Ferenczi's Language of Tenderness: Working with Disturbances from the Earliest Years. He sees the two languages as being reflected in the differing atmospheres of cooperation and confrontation shown in relational and classical psychoanalysis. Rentoul argues that the distinction between the two models needs to be made sharper; a new paradigm for psychoanalysis has come into being as a result of Ferenczi's work.