The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Volume 2:1914-1919 Edited by Ernst-Falzeder and Eva Brabant, with the collaboration of Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Correspondence ofSigmund Freud and SándorFerenczi. Volume 2:1914-1919. Edited by Ernst-Falzeder and Eva Brabant, with the collaboration of Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996, Pp. 397. $45.00. Sándor Ferenczi, born in 1873, was a Hungarian neuropsychiatrist and psychoanalyst , an organizational linchpin of the early psychoanalytic movement, and a technical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis. Some six decades after his death, Sigmund Freud, senior to Ferenczi by 19 years, still needs no introduction. This volume of their correspondence covers the period 1914-1919, that is to say the years of the Great War in Europe. Volume I of the correspondence began with letters from 1908. A third and final volume is scheduled fot publication in the fall of 1997. The volumes are carefully edited and annotated, and introductions set the stage and introduce the dramatis personae so that even a reader unfamiliar with early psychoanalytic politics can recognize the personal and professional currents alluded to in the letters. The years of the Great War brought anxiety and material deprivation, more so for Freud in Vienna than for Ferenczi. Freud's three sons and his son-in-law were at war, and he longed for news of them and recorded in these letters each postcard and report confirming their safety. Supplies were scarce, and parcels of bread, lard, and other essentials—most notably cigars—from Ferenczi and Freud's other acolytes with better access to resources were gratefully acknowledged. In the aftermath of the war, Freud wrote, ' 'The overly great tension, the insight into the helplessness, inability to know what to do, and lack of understanding about everything that is happening makes one apathetic in the end and casts one back onto one's own discomfort" (letter number 801). The view provided of the Europe of the war years, albeit a narrow one, is a poignant aspect of this volume's appeal. This period of Ferenczi's life was dominated by vacillation over marriage to his lover, Gizella Palos, a married woman with whose daughter Elma he had also conducted an affair during his psychoanalytic treatment of the latter. The triangle may have been even more sordid than that summary implies, for a cryptic reference in one letter suggests that blackmail and abortion figured in as well (630) . Ultimately, Ferenczi did marry Frau Palos, after having repeatedly turned to Freud for counsel and for analytic understanding ofhis turmoil—what Freud called his "inner theater ofwar'' (594) . Perhaps the mostinteresting aspect ofthe interaction between Freud and Ferenczi is Freud's refusal to allow psychoanalysis to be misused. When Ferenczi dithered about the sexual meaning of his supposedly psychogenic nasal symptoms, Freud gruffly replied, "One must be able to decide whether one loves a woman or Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 40, 3 ¦ Spring 1997 | 455 not even with stuffed-up nostrils" (601). Finally, he told Ferenczi, "It seems to me that you are now using your analysis as a means of confusing your affairs, as you earlier used it to delay" (631). Overall Freud comes across in this correspondence as a worldly, settled, and sensible man with a deep and humane concern for his younger friend despite his clear awareness of the latter's foibles. In reply to Ferenczi 's idealization of him as Goethe-like, Freud confessed, "I have found in myself only one quality of the first rank, a kind of courage, which is unshaken by convention " (542). Ferenczi underwent three brief periods of analysis with Freud, and much of the correspondence underscores the very different boundary between analytic communication and personal relationships that existed in the early days of psychoanalysis and that exist now. When Ferenczi begged Freud to arrange analytic hours for him during a vacation which Ferenczi planned to spend in Vienna visiting Freud, the latter agreed to reserve two analytic hours daily. He went on, "I also hope to see much of you otherwise, and you should at least have one meal with us daily. Technique at least will require that nothing personal will be discussed outside the sessions " (611). The...