You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Parched after a reading from my biography of Freud's early to middle years (Newton, 1995), I had repaired to the bar when a member of the audience, an Irish analyst from New York, stuck his chin under mine and demanded to know how I could write a biography of Freud without mentioning Ferenczi. Would he consider it merely an evasion, I asked, if I said that the two men had not met by the time my biography ends? He laughed in that generous Irish way and paid for my drink, setting his suspicions aside without entirely relinquishing them. For I sensed that in his heart he now believed that had my biography gone further, I would have neglected Ferenczi. In this way I received my first inkling that Ferenczi was back.
It was not long before I received another bulletin. I had been asked by a psychoanalytic society to make a presentation, and I had chosen for my title, “Psychoanalytic Letters.” I liked the title, it seemed evocative—scarlet letters came to mind—and sufficiently ambiguous to allow me to decide when that obligation then so happily in the distance drew near exactly what I would talk about, thus wankering out in advance from any need for serious preparation. Should the talk come at too bad, or too good, a time, I could even adopt the dodge of reading some long letters out loud—effortless, time consuming, and it would show an un-tendentious humility before the historical record.
I had gushed to the person who invited me that there were wonderful new volumes of letters recently published on which the biographically curious could feast. These included volume one of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence (Brabant, Falzeder, & Giampieri-Deutsch, 1993), which I was looking forward to reading when I had succeeded in beating back the recurrent harassments of an academic life. In the event, this longed for respite never occurred and