This volume spans a turbulent period, beginning with the controversy over Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth and continuing through Ferenczi's lectures in New York and his involvement in a bitter controversy with American analysts over the practice of lay analysis. On his return from America, Ferenczi's relationship with Freud deteriorated, as Freud became increasingly critical of his theoretical and clinical innovations.
Their troubled friendship was further complicated by ill health--Freud's cancer of the jaw and the pernicious anemia that finally killed Ferenczi in The controversies between Freud and Ferenczi continue to this day, as psychoanalysts reassess Ferenczi's innovations, and increasingly challenge the allegations of mental illness leveled against him after his death by Freud and Ernest Jones.
The correspondence, now published in its entirety, will deepen understanding of these issues and of the history of psychoanalysis as a whole. Volume I of the three-volume Freud-Ferenczi correspondence closes with Freud's letter from Vienna, dated June 28, , to his younger colleague in Budapest: "I am writing under the impression of the surprising murder in Sarajevo, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen!
Uncertainty pervades these letters: Will Ferenczi be called up? Will food and fuel-and cigar-shortages continue? Will Freud's three enlisted sons and son-in-law come through the war intact? And will Freud's "problem-child," psychoanalysis, survive? In these, as in other matters, both men display characteristic contradictions and inconsistencies, Freud restrained, Ferenczi more effusive and revealing.
Freud, for example, unswervingly favors Ferenczi's marriage to Gizella and views his indecision as "resistance"; yet several years later, commenting on Otto Rank's wife, Freud remarks, "One certainly can't judge in these matters The letters vividly record the use--and misuse--of analysis and self-analysis and the close interweaving of personal and professional matters in the early history of psychoanalysis.
