You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To any but the most besotted admirer of the correspondents, this second volume must come, initially at least, as a disappointment. It is not just the drop in excitement that goes, perhaps inevitably, with familiarity-the two men know each other pretty well by now, while we as readers of the earlier volume have been able to follow the unfolding of their friendship-but something altogether simpler and more brutal: the Great War. As the dates show, almost all the letters are written in the shadow of the conflict between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and their few allies) and the largely Western alliance led by Britain, France and, later, the United States. And, of course, the Armistice of November 1918 brought scant comfort to the defeated. Throughout, Freud is tormented by worries about his family and, above all, his soldier sons; Ferenczi (serving as a Medical Officer) is caught up in endless schemes and negotiations for a better posting while continually confronting, in his work, the dreadful physical and psychic consequences of warfare; and both men are continually preoccupied by shortages, enforced separations, restrictions on travel, censorship, and all the paraphernalia of world war. Much of what they write to each other could have been written by any two educated men of their time and place, while the things that are peculiar to them are also coloured by the war. Freud repeatedly laments his inability to write anything important or new, is gloomy about the future (even the present) of psychoanalysis, and has health worries. Ferenczi, always given to somatizing inner conflict, has enough symptoms to fill a textbook, and writes in detail about them all, while also deploring the drying up of his creativity. Both men badly miss the regular gatherings and congresses of the prewar years, and have to worry about whether they can get a reliable publisher, or even enough paper to make publication possible. Both are aware too of the rising tide of antisemi