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“The day of Ferenczi’s death remained engraved on my memory. On that May 22, 1933, I was at my grandparents. The entire house was upset, my grandmother was crying, there was a constant back and forth between the Kovàcs’s and Ferenczi’s house. ‘The Doctor died,’ was heard whispered or on answering the phone. For my part I was upset too by the illness of my grandmother’s little fox-terrier, Bell, who was dying of Carreé’s illness. He died the same morning as Ferenczi died. Then, I was also crying, as everyone else in the house, but I did not know well if it was for the Doctor or for the dog, or because everyone was crying. I didn’t dare to speak to anyone and I felt a little frightened by the intensity of the emotions which overwhelmed me from both outside and inside.” (p. 28; all translations by current author)
This natural blurring of the distinction between what comes from outside and what comes from inside is perhaps the narrative mark of this splendid book on psychoanalysis, history, and life that Judith Dupont has offered us.
Judith Dupont's grandmother was Vilma Kovàcs (1883–1940). She was in analysis with Ferenczi, perhaps even before World War I, and herself later became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and one of Ferenczi's closest collaborators of (she was the one who systematized the Hungarian psychoanalytic training system). Vilma's eldest child, Alice (1898–1939), followed in her mother’s footsteps and herself became a famous analyst. At the lyceum, one of her school friends was Margit Schönberger, who later became Margaret Mahler, and another was the brother of Michael Bergsmann, who later adopted the name Michael Balint (1896–1970). After their university studies, Alice and Michael married and moved to Berlin to undertake an analytic training with Hans Sachs. Michael was not fully satisfied with his first analysis and, once back in Budapest, had a second analysis with Ferenczi, becoming his chief collaborator. Ferenczi himself, in his C