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It is my painful duty to announce to you the death of one of our most distinguished and well-beloved colleagues. After a long and distressing illness, Sandor Ferenczi died on May 22nd, shortly before the celebration of his sixtieth birthday. With him we lose one of the leading pioneers of psycho-analysis, an inspiring personality and a trusty friend.
Younger colleagues have perhaps seen Ferenczi through a tinted glass, his personality impaired by chronic illness and his later work not readily to be understood or appreciated. It is therefore not easy for me to convey to them the tremendous significance that Ferenczi had in the earlier development of psycho-analysis, both as a branch of science and as an organization of our common work. Let me relate a few of the actual facts of his life in this connection. He had practised for ten years in Budapest as a neurologist and psychiatrist before seriously working at psycho-analysis. In these years he became familiar with both the powers and the limitations of the hypnotic method. On reading the Traumdeutung on its appearance he had not been able to assimilate its teachings, and it was only on recurring later to the Studien über Hysterie, a book he had casually read years before, that he was impressed by the new perspective there opened out; the Studien remained his favourite among Freud's writings, and he could point out in them the most astonishing hints of Freud's later ideas. One may date his real contact with psycho-analytical work to 1907, the year he first met Freud. From then he remained for many years in the closest friendship, scientific and