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In our view, the story begins in 1918, at the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Budapest, the culmination point in Sándor Ferenczi's professional life — a few years after Freud had written about him that until then “Hungary … has produced only one collaborator, S. Ferenczi, but one that indeed outweighs a whole society” (Freud, 1914a, p. 33). In fact, in the 1910s and 1920s Ferenczi was, apart from Otto Rank, Freud's closest friend and collaborator. Looking back, Freud said in 1933 that their relationship had been even more than mere friendship — namely, an “intimate sharing of life, feelings and interests” (Fr., January 11, 1933).‡ At this Budapest Congress, in September 1918, Freud's lecture, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1919 [1918]), was to be his swan song on the subject of psychoanalytic technique; in it he spoke about “a new field of analytic technique,” which, however, “is still in the course of being evolved” (p. 162).
Indeed, Freud would never again take up this question in public; he seemed to prefer to leave it to his intellectual circle, offering encouragement in the form of a prize for the best study on the correlation of theory and technique (Freud, 1922). Apparently, his hopes were high. Ferenczi and Rank, in particular, would take up the challenge and write seminal works on the issue.