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The painful personal and professional controversy which arose between Sigmund Freud and his favourite pupil, Sándor Ferenczi, towards the end of the latter's life, is examined first from an historical perspective and then as a metaphor for conflicts universally experienced by the analyst in daily work. Their disagreement originates in Ferenczi's challenge—articulated in his techniques of 'relaxation' and 'indulgence'—to Freud's principle of 'abstinence'. By 1930, their views on the analytic relationship had become so highly polarized that Freud came to represent the emphasis on thinking and frustration while Ferenczi stood for gratification and feeling. Ultimately, their controversy centred around Freud's emphasis on the work of remembering and reconstructing in contrast to Ferenczi's emphasis on re-living and re-experiencing. The relevance of these controversies to current views on what aspects of the repetition in psychoanalysis are therapeutic is illustrated by a clinical example from the literature of a patient who wants to hold the analyst's hand during the re-experiencing of an early traumatic event. The continuing influence of their controversy on contemporary debates about the nature of the analytic relationship and the analyst's participation in the repetition compulsion through reenactments is highlighted.