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IN MAY 1933, THERE DIED IN Budapest the greatest of Freud's pupils, Sándor Ferenczi, a man, great not only because of his remarkable intellect, imagination, and unquenchable scientific curiosity, but also because of his profound simplicity, humility, and gentle human kindliness.
He was born in a small town in Hungary, the son of a Jewish bookseller. The family was large, a fact which undoubtedly contributed to the development of his sociable, friendly nature. Of a restless mind, he sought always to satisfy his curiosity, a curiosity which did not rest with mastering such problems as how to make fireworks and how to discover the inner structure of the eye from reflections on his own eyeglasses, but sought always to master the secret of people—why they did what they did, what they really felt. He sought in his father's bookshop for the answer. No bookshelf was too high for him, and he often read while still sitting on the top of the ladder. So quiet and lost to his surroundings would he become that once the clerk actually started to carry the ladder away, not realizing that he was perched there. In this way he very early became acquainted with the greatest writers and philosophers.
Still seeking to understand people, he studied medicine and chose as his specialty the nervous and mental diseases. Treatment of these disorders was still very unsatisfactory at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was sought to relax the nerves by various types of hot and cold baths. Persuasion, suggestion, and hypnosis were also in vogue. The underlying principle of these methods was the use of the authority of the physician to banish the fears of the patient. Ferenczi became skillful in all these, finding his best results