The Feud between Freud and Ferenczi over Love

Love, Tennessee Williams remarked, is another four-letter word. It is one of the most misunderstood words in life and in psychoanalysis, in health and disease, for a long time an unmentionable taboo among psychoanalysts. Thus the Vocabulaire of Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) contains only the entry “Libido,” as does the original Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts published by the American Psychoanalytic Association (Moore and Fine, 1967). That lack was corrected in the enlarged 1990 edition of the Glossary but, surprisingly, it refers to no words on love by Freud; quite expectedly, it is silent about the contribution of another unsung analyst that devoted his attention to the subject of love, Theodor Reik (1944).

Does this mean that Freud knew nothing and said nothing about love? Not in the least; but Freud dealt with love in ways both ambivalent and reductive, reducing love to libido, happiness to pleasure and will to wish, and at times seemed to neglect it altogether, bequeathing this repression of love on his followers. However, the repressed will return, and it returned most tellingly in the work of Ferenczi.

For love was very much on the mind of the most gifted and most maligned of Freud's students, Sándor Ferenczi, whose revival has recently become a tidal wave. It is thus timely to add to the effort of vindicating both love and Ferenczi. Not that the facts about love and Ferenczi have been buried in dusty archives: in the wake of contributions of his follower Izette de Forest (1954) and of the executor of Ferenczi's literary estate, Michael Balint (1965), the torch has been carried by Hungarian-descent members of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Judith Dupont and André Haynal, and many others. A high water mark was the posthumous publication of Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1932). Before we look in greater detail at Ferenczi it should be of interest to see what happened to Freud and love.