The First Formal Reaction to C.G. Jung's Departure from Psychoanalysis: Sándor Ferenczi's Review of Symbols of Transformation

In his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911-1912) and his lectures at Fordham University, published as Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (1912), Jung marked out the foundations of his growing independence from the psychoanalytic movement, to which Freud initiated an organized response by Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones and himself. In 1914, Sándor Ferenczi published his critique of Jung's Wandlungen and opened the psychoanalytic counter-offensive against the Zurich School. Ferenczi's and Jones's replies remain unavailable in English, but the gap in the English-language historical record represented by the absence of Ferenczi's critique is especially noteworthy. It was through the Wandlungen that Jung first - gradually and painfully - articulated his differences from Freud, and Freud gradually and painfully recognized it; and it was Ferenczi who formulated the first psychoanalytic reaction to this foundational document. We are here filling in this gap by offering an English translation of Ferenczi's review, which appeared in the newly founded Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse (; for reviews of the Darstellung, see Abraham 1914; Jones 1914).