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The extensive correspondence (1908–33) between Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Sandor Ferenczi, his most beloved pupil, reveals the depth of Freud's feelings and admiration for the latter's creative imagination and brilliance (see, for example, the letters in Freud, 1987; [1915]). By the early twenties, Ferenczi was recognized as the 'crown prince' of psychoanalysis and as a master of psychoanalytic technique. Yet, in the five or so years before Ferenczi's death in 1933, their intimate and mutually respectful relationship was torn apart by a disagreement which caused a profound upheaval not only in their personal relationship but also in the entire psychoanalytic community. The sequelae and after-shocks of their disagreement—still unresolved at the time of Ferenczi's death—have not yet been fully examined by and integrated into contemporary psychoanalysis.
In his 1969 introduction to Sandor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary, Michael Balint, Ferenczi's student, close friend and champion, assumed that the Diary would be published at the same time as the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence. Believing the publication of the correspondence to be imminent, Balint wrote that the simultaneous publication of the Diary and the correspondence would symbolize:
the waves of the painful disagreement that overshadowed the last two or three years of the friendship between these two great men have sufficiently settled to enable the psychoanalytic world to judge the real differences in an impartial but sympathetic manner (p. 220).
Unfortunately, that revealing correspondence now—more than twenty years later—has still not been published. I share Balint's view that the Diary is best understood as a fragmentary postscript to their correspondence. The Diary contains Ferenczi's unedited and uncensored writings as he approached the terminal phase of his illness—pernicious anaemia, the cause of his death—less than 8 months after he wrote the last entry. Thus, Dupont's publication of