Journal of the History of Ideas

Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Briefwechsel, Vol.I/1 (1908/11), ed. by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giamperi-Deutsch, directed by André Haynal. Böhlau Verlag, 1993, 446 pages, with 48 black and white illustrations, ca. $60.

The publication now of the revealing correspondence between such immensely complex and influential individuals as Freud and Ferenczi would be welcome at any time, but it is especially appropriate now, considering the recently intensified interest in Ferenczi on the part of many psychoanalysts in the United States and Europe. The principal editor of the correspondence, the Swiss analyst André Haynal, has written much on Ferenczi, whom he admires. Actually these early letters cast at least as much light on the thinking and motivation of the “father of psychoanalysis” as on those of his important disciple. This is the first of six books planned for publication in the German edition over the next few years, and it well deserves individual treatment, both for the focus it provides on the inchoate phase of major problems and for the insights that attention to the original German text can offer (some overlooked by the editors).

Naturally, biographical information such as that provided by these intimate letters need not throw light on anything other than the personality of their authors. Yet these letters in fact contain important material that directly links the personal to the theoretical preoccupations of their authors. This results in part from the dialogical form of correspondence as an expression of interacting subjectivities. Moreover, certain statements in the letters give us a glimpse into the formation of the Adlerian and Jungian schools of psychoanalysis (and, potentially, Ferenczi’s own version of psychoanalysis), understood not only in terms of theoretical differences but also as an interplay of personalities. (In light of the irreconcilable ideological schisms that developed in the group, Ferenczi’s faith—which he shared with Freud—that psychoanalysis [End Page 365] could offer a sociology grounded in “facts” and free of all hypocrisy and cliché, seems utopian [124Fer].)

After the professional tone sounded in his first letters Ferenczi, who later acknowledged the impact on him of Freud’s great self-revelatory Interpretation of Dreams, began to present intimate details of his own emotional life as though to a Father Confessor. Suffering from what he called his “brother complex” (a phrase repeated throughout the letters), Ferenczi complained continually about his “brother enemies” (97Fer, 143Fer; cf. 130F, 132F) among the Viennese psychoanalysts and admitted (109Fer) to wanting to be a “little Freud” or Freud’s “one and only” son (131Fer). Toward Jung, who occupied a position between father and brother, Ferenczi behaved ambivalently: while he made a “filial” confession of his “complex” to Jung (89Fer), he also felt fraternal rivalry toward Jung, as Freud well realized (see 246F); and he betrays a preoccupation with the older analyst through homophonic word associations between “Jung” and the “junge” or “jüngere” analysts (109Fer, 127Fer). (To the name of Fließ—or Fliess in its English transliteration—whose theory of periodicity had fascinated Freud, Ferenczi associated “fließen,” “flott,” and “Fluß” in 155Fer, 173Fer, and 189Fer.)

The dovetailing evidenced in the letters between Ferenczi’s weaknesses (his “brother complex”) and Freud’s (his need to feel superior, the “father” —see 99F and 259F—and, as will appear presently, his own brother complex) contributed significantly to the further development of Ferenczi’s theories and to Freud’s behavior toward Ferenczi and Elma. The complementarity of feelings suggests that the junior analyst constantly in pursuit of input from the older “mentor” had developed a transference toward him. And Freud reciprocated. (Freud explained in the case of Dora that the transferences of the patient were experiences revived from the past and applied to the person of the physician; conversely, countertransference was the analyst’s response to the patient’s transference.)

The emblem of Ferenczi’s transference is a photo taken in 1917 of the two during a trip which shows them side by side, each with a similar cane (comparable to the identical rings and cigars that Freud prescribed for all members of his inner circle attending their meetings). Ferenczi gazes at...