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With the publication of the third and final volume of Freud and Ferenczi's correspondence, the English language reader now has full access to perhaps one of the most moving and theoretically rich, known archival sources for the history of psychoanalysis. Moreover any scholar interested in the ways in which a discipline is formed and consolidated, in the interplay of the public and private spheres, would have much to learn from it. The previous two volumes charted the rapid progress of a friendship that glowed with the fiery passion of intellectual exchanges, with the pragmatic concerns raised by the building of a very particular empire, and with the more muted but no less significant intimacies of emotional and psychic revelations (especially but by no means exclusively on Ferenczi's side). The personal and professional closeness and trust that had existed between the two men are still in evidence here but are under threat, and this later collection is a testimony to the strength of their friendship as it survives the pressures of illness, depression and isolation, increasingly serious professional and intellectual disagreements and the demands of an expanding and fractious psychoanalytic movement. And it is death, unexpectedly that of the younger Ferenczi rather than that of the ailing Freud, which finally put an end to what Freud had called ‘an intimate community of life, feeling and interest’ (letter 1241, p. 446).
But it is as though death casts its long shadow over the whole of this final instalment of the correspondence. The first few pages record the death on 20 January 1920 of Anton von Freund, a close friend and patron of the movement, then, a few days later, the sudden death of Freud's daughter Sophie. ‘The death as painful as it is, does not overturn any attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of my sons, now comes that of my daughter. Since I am profoundly unbelieving, I have no one to blame, and I know there is no place where one can