The notion of tact is basic to psychoanalytic knowhow, implicit in the work of Sigmund Freud, and explicit in that of Sándor Ferenczi. In France, for example, it was developed by Sacha Nacht under the category of "presence of the psychoanalyst."

This deceptively simple notion, to which Ferenczi returned a number of times in articles he wrote near the end of his life, deserves to be discussed, as he himself did in his article of 1928, "The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique": When and how should something be communicated to the analysand? "It is above all a question of psychological tact, " he replied. "But what is 'tact'? The answer is not very difficult. It is the capacity for empathy. If, with the aid of knowledge we have obtained from the dissection of many minds, but above all from the dissection of our own, we have succeeded in forming a picture of possible or probable associations of the patient's of which he is...