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As stated on the fourth cover page by the publisher of the book, “This book is neither a scholarly treatise nor a classic biography. It is the moving story of a perhaps impossible friendship and a love that was no less impossible” (translations are mine except for Freud and Ferenczi).
A “moving story” indeed! Benoît Peeters describes himself as a “storyteller” in a 2015 interview in Montreal.1 He is a writer, an author of numerous novels and stories, an essayist, a biographer (of Derrida [Peeters 2010], Hergé [Peeters 2002], and Paul Valéry [Peeters 1989], among others), an editor, and a screenwriter, a man of many talents and passions. He is as passionate about comic strips, Hergé's Tintin in particular, as he is about cooking or philosophy—and now psychoanalysis. Initially an outsider to psychoanalysis, he became fascinated with Ferenczi after meeting him a long time ago through his work Thalassa (Ferenczi 1924) and, later on,
Interview conducted on May 9, 2015, by Jade Bourdages in Montreal at the bookshop Le Port de Tête.
reading the first volume of the correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi (Freud 1908-1914), the Clinical Diary (Ferenczi 1932), and Ferenczi's last articles . It was an opportunity for him to immerse himself in the history of the tumultuous relationship between the two men, but also in the history of nascent psychoanalysis, the conflicts and rivalries within this milieu, closely woven with the social and political history of the time. His aim is to make this story and the portrait he paints of “l'enfant terrible de la psychanalyse”2 as accessible as possible. In order to do so, he consulted an enormous quantity of archives, documents, and authors, French and English, to which he refers without ever making the reading of his book arduous. All the references are to be found in the notes at the end of the book. The story is enriched by an abundant collection of photographic archives that punctuate each of the 33 short chapters.
From the very fi