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On a Sunday afternoon in January 1908, a squat, cherubic, bespectacled man, Sandor Ferenczi, stood before the wooden door of Berggasse 19. He was accompanied by Dr. Stein, a slight acquaintance of Freud, who provided the formal introduction. Ferenczi was a recent convert to the new psychoanalytic science, having just reread
The Interpretation of Dreams, and was determined to meet its author. The outcome of that Sunday encounter could have turned out like innumerable other introductions of such sort, a mannered, perhaps strained conversation, and then goodbye, another brief but innocuous engagement, another name. Those meetings leave little for history. But Ferenczi and Freud struck a mutual chord and left behind traces of a professional and personal friendship that would both exert a distinct influence on the development of the foundling science and leave on one of its participants an indelible mark. Ferenczi was invited back for a two-week stay in August.
Freud was drawn to Ferenczi's lively, inquisitive mind, which mirrored a tendency that Freud struggled all his life to tame and discipline. Every topic drew an animated response. The two would talk long into the night, each prodding the other to further speculation. Usually it was Freud who watched Ferenczi's ecstatic intuitions soar beyond his conjectures. The nearly 2500 letters Freud wrote to Ferenczi attest to his admiration and affection for the new disciple. At one time Freud expressed the wish that Mathilde, his eldest daughter, marry Ferenczi, and he even went so far as to address him a “My Dear Son”-the sentiment of which was not lost on Ferenczi, whose need for intimacy would never be sated. Yet the irony remains: those aspects of Ferenczi's character which drew him close to Freud ultimately fueled the schism.
Freud analyzed Ferenczi in two brief stints during 1914 and 1916, but the transference was never resolved; its positive aspect was encouraged and exacerbated by their personal and professional cont