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The aim of this article is to examine the variety of psychoanalytic experience and one of its origins, namely, the clinical and theoretical experimentation in the work of Sándor Ferenczi. I will begin with his definition of psychoanalysis as an experimental method and the assertion that psychoanalysis is an experimental psychology and try to understand the importance of this conception in the subsequent development of psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice. In parallel, I will explore certain epistemological and clinical aspects that make the contribution of the Hungarian psychoanalyst to the development of contemporary psychoanalysis evident. In conclusion, I will seek to compare the notion of psychoanalytic experience with that of clinical reality, understood as the context or situation where a tension exists between psychic reality (and its numerous forms of expression) and material or external reality (with its different forms of operational efficiency).