The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi (review)

This is a splendid volume, a model of how published correspondence should be presented and edited. Axel Hoffer has written an outstanding introduction, and the editors and translator have treated the entire project with scrupulous care and respect. This particular group of letters is the second in a series of three, the first (1908-1914) having already been published, and the third (from 1920 on) due out shortly.

The appearance of such an important collection in the history of psychoanalysis is long overdue, and it is readily apparent why some powerful individuals resisted publication for so long: Freud’s and Ferenczi’s human flaws are all too apparent, and their intermittent lapses from psychoanalytic tenets are evident. We see Freud’s authoritarian grip on the worshipful younger Ferenczi, and the latter’s oscillation between self-abnegating obedience and guilty rebellion. Ferenczi’s personal life is chaotic. He obsesses over whether to marry Gizella, with whom he has had a long, on-again/off-again affair, or the youthful Elma, Gizella’s daughter, whom he has analyzed (and, to complicate the situation, he has also slept with Sarolta, Gizella’s sister). While Freud says he knows he should not interfere in such matters, he—who has analyzed Ferenczi—campaigns unceasingly for Gizella.

Yet counterbalancing these human frailties we see human strengths. The two men have a warm and close relationship based on strong mutual respect, and Freud, though the “father,” values Ferenczi’s opinion and judgment. Moreover, although Freud is by custom and law the patriarch of his family, he obviously respects many of his wife’s personal desires—much more so than in their early life together. He has arrived at a touchingly mature position. Talking about himself (at sixty-one), as well as Ferenczi, Freud writes that Gizella, eight years Ferenczi’s senior, “has already been [your wife] for fifteen years, became that when she was young and beautiful, has aged with you, and that should not be a motive for casting out one’s wife after so many long years. . . . Incidentally—she is today, with all the deficiencies of her—merely somatic—age, still worth incomparably more that most of the squeaky-clean and glossy women who get married” (p. 249).

The letters remind us of the tensions that inevitably exist between the sophisticated recognition of what scientific conduct should be and its practice under all circumstances. Freud wrote: “I maintain that one should not make theories—they must fall into one’s house as uninvited guests while one is occupied with the investigation of details” (p. 74). We know, however, that to Freud and subsequent analysts this has remained one of the most challenging difficulties in conducting psychoanalytic research. Furthermore, Freud realized the importance of scientific dissent: “[Can] science thrive at all,” he asked, “in the democratic confusion of its operations[?] But,” he concluded, “authority is even worse” (p. 115). Yet we are painfully aware that Freud often imposed his positions and resisted divergent viewpoints.

On his part, Ferenczi threw himself heart and soul into psychoanalysis, but sometimes with mixed results. He ceaselessly subjected his every thought, word, and action to analysis. It raised his self-awareness and probably increased his effectiveness as a therapist, but it led him into wild symbolizing, endless obsessing, and delayed diagnosis of patent physical disease. In addition, he recognized that analytic treatment inevitably drew both analyst and analysand into a close, emotional relationship, and that this could be used in the therapy. So-called analytic neutrality did not really exist. Yet Ferenczi could harm both himself and his patients by encounters that were too intimate.

The letters offer clear evidence of Ferenczi’s analytic reductionism and Freud’s abuses of power. But while it is easy to use this correspondence to condemn Freud and Ferenczi, this can be done only by deliberately ignoring...