front cover of The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi
Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi
Harvard University Press, 1993

Volume I of the three-volume Freud-Ferenczi correspondence closes with Freud's letter from Vienna, dated June 28, 1914, 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!' "Now," he continues in a more familiar vein, "to our affairs!" The nation-shattering events of World War I form a somber canvas for "our affairs" and the exchanges of the two correspondents in volume 2 (July 1914 through December 1919). 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?At the same time, a more intimate drama is unfolding: Freud's three-part analysis of Ferenczi in 1914 and 1916 ("finished but not terminated"); Ferenczi's concomitant turmoil over whether to marry his mistress, Gizella Pálos, or her daughter, Elma; and the refraction of all these relationships in constantly shifting triads and dyads. 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...on behalf of another." Ferenczi, for his part, reacts to the paternal authority of the "father of psychoanalysis" as an alternately obedient and rebellious son.

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. Ferenczi's eventual disagreement with Freud about "head and heart," objective detachment versus subjective involvement and engagement in the analytic relationship--an issue that would emerge more clearly in the ensuing years--is hinted at here. As the decade and the volume end, the correspondents continue their literary conversation, unaware of the painful and heartrending events ahead.

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A Phylogenetic Fantasy
Overview of the Transference Neuroses
Sigmund Freud
Harvard University Press, 1987

This volume heralds the appearance, for the first time in many years, of a totally new document by Sigmund Freud. It is the draft of a lost metapsychological paper, one of twelve essays written during World War I at the peak of the master's powers. Freud intended to publish all twelve in book form, under the title Preliminaries to a Metapsychology, and thereby set out the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis. Scholars have long lamented the disappearance without a trace of seven of these important essays.

Only in 1983 did Ilse Grubrich-Simitis happen upon this draft, in Freud's handwriting, in an old trunk containing papers and documents of his Hungarian collaborator Sándor Ferenczi. With the help of a brief letter Freud had written on the back of the last page, she soon realized that the manuscript she had found was the draft of the final paper in the series. That draft is published here in facsimile, together with a transcription in German of the facsimile and the English translation.

In the first part of the draft, which is written in a kind of shorthand, Freud contrasts the three classic transference neuroses: anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis. In the second part, which is written in complete sentences, Freud undertakes a daringly speculative "phylogenetic fantasy" He explores whether the debilitating illnesses of the neurotic and the psychotic today might have originated long ago as adaptive responses of the entire species to threatening environmental changes or to traumatic events in the prehistory of mankind.

In the draft "Fantasy" Freud modifies and expands the line of reasoning he began in Totem and Taboo (1912-13) after an intensely productive exchange with Ferenczi about Lamarckian concepts, making this recovered draft of major significance to students not only of psychoanalysis but also of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.

Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has contributed a detailed essay, setting the overview in the context of Freud's life, his work, and his historical and scientific prominence. She quotes from relevant letters of Freud and Ferenczi, some published here for the first time.

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