The Correspondence Of Sigmund Freud And Sandor Ferenczi: Volume 1, 1908-1914.: Edited by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, with an introduction by André Haynal. Translated by Peter T. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1993, 580 pp. $39.95.

Sandor Ferenczi was born in 1873 in Miskolcz, Hungary, the eighth child of 12 in a family of Polish-Jewish origins. Educated in medicine in Vienna, he was steeped in the cosmopolitan cultural richness of German-speaking Central Europe. Like many liberated intellectuals of Jewish background, he had extensive artistic, literary, and scientific interests, and he became an active member of the Budapest intelligentsia as a young physician. Although he had evidently read Freud

and Breuer's work on hysteria as early as 1893 and had developed some parallel interests in the relationship between sexuality and neurosis, Ferenczi did not develop what was to become his lifelong passionate interest in psychoanalysis until 1908, when he was introduced to his older colleague, Freud, by Dr. Fulop Stein of Budapest. From then on, an intense and extremely productive relationship ensued, which was to last—with all its contretemps and interruptions—until Ferenczi's death from pernicious anemia in 1933.

The Correspondence is the fruit of this vital friendship, and it is a truly monumental collection of over 1300 documents—letters, cards, and telegrams—covering a vast range of personal, cultural, and psychoanalytic topics. Volume 1 spans the period from January 1908 to July 1914, following the assassination of the archduke at Sarajevo, which Freud records with some alarm. It has been translated and organized with explanatory notes and references by a team of scholars consisting of Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, under the supervision of André Haynal. The English translation is by Peter Hoffer.

The Correspondence is a fascinating tome, filled with glimpses into the vanished culture of pre-World War I Europe, the origins of the psychoanalytic movement, and the personal lives of the two friends, along with comments about many other familiar figures including Adler (“the paranoiac,” p. 285), Binswanger (“little talent,” p. 376), Jones (Ferenczi's “best and dearest