The author examines the history of the psychoanalytic essay prize of 1922, of its failure and of the impact of the rejection by the analytic community of the two authors who were the only ones to offer a response. Ferenczi and Rank tried to respond to Freud’s wish to link theoretical advances with progress in technique. Their book, albeit full of ideas, in particular with regard to questions on the nature of the transference and the place of the countertransference in the analytic situation, was rejected violently. The questions examined were also put to one side for thirty years. The unity and coherence of the psychoanalytic movement was thereby preserved at the price of rigidifying the technique taught within the new form of psychoanalytic training. The author examines Ferenczi’s last writings as testamentary epistles, a series of questions put to Freud, but which become increasingly solitary. The question of the prize was still an issue of great importance.