The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi (review)

Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, eds., with the collaboration of Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol. 3, 1920-1933. Translated by Peter T. Hoffer. Introduction by Judith Dupont. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000. xliv + 473 pp. $59.95 (0-674-00297-0).

It is a startling experience to read this third volume of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence after reading volume 2, which covers the immediately preceding years of 1914-19. The atmosphere that emanates from the earlier letters, while exposing the problematic personalities and temperaments of the two protagonists, is basically compassionate and friendly. But in volume 3 we are aroused and shaken by the dramas surrounding Sigmund Freud's debilitating illness from cancer and Sàndor Ferenczi's bold attempt to introduce new parameters into psychoanalytic therapy. It is also quite sad to see the two old colleagues and friends unable to work out their scientific disagreements, though they care for each other very deeply. Age and illness take their toll.

Freud's cancer and Ferenczi's therapeutic experimentations form the poles around which all manner of controversies swirl. The twenties are contentious years, reinforcing the pattern in the psychoanalytic movement of dissensions and splits first begun by Freud himself. Now the hostilities between the analysts in Berlin--supported by Ernest Jones--on the one hand, and Ferenczi and Otto Rank, on the other, bedevil Freud. The issue of "lay analysis" hardens his long-standing dislike of America--"the crime of Columbus" (p. xxviii)--and the Americans themselves. He analyzes them when they come to Vienna, but does so solely for their hard currency, and he feels betrayed by any one of his followers who visits the United States to give lectures or to conduct analyses.

What clearly emerges from the letters, hitherto downplayed by Freud's biographers, is the extent of his despondency and depression over his medical condition. The official line has consistently been that he bore the misery produced by his ill-fitting mouth prostheses with detachment and stoicism. The letters belie this: he suffered greatly and longed to give up treating patients because of his difficulties speaking and, eventually, hearing. He also lost interest in psychoanalysis as a treatment--we might speculate that this was precisely because of its physical demands--and wished to turn all his energies to research and theoretical developments. In his Clinical Diary, quoted in the introduction to the Correspondence, Ferenczi wrote of Freud: "Shared only with a trusted few, that neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (p. xxii). As shocking as this appears, it must nevertheless be placed in context. From high school onward, Freud did not see himself as a healer, but rather an explorer, someone who would make world-altering discoveries. While working out the principles of psychoanalysis, he did see many patients with the goal of treating them. Yet to expand the boundaries of psychoanalysis continued to grip him ardently. Under the pressure of severe illness and looming death, he became even more driven to enlarge the frontiers of his discovery.

As Freud turned increasingly to research with the hope of increasing the store of psychoanalytic knowledge (and also to the institutional survival and propagation of psychoanalysis), Ferenczi turned 180 degrees the other way: he became more and more interested in treatment, in the therapeutic role of a physician. He was beginning to find evidence of the importance of trauma in the etiology of illness (Freud's old seduction theory); he was learning of the significance of pre-Oedipal events (the role of the mother); and he also began experimenting with new treatment techniques, some of which involved physical contact, including kissing. He believed that the proper use of psychoanalysis as a treatment tool was to tailor...