Dr. Sándor Ferenczi (on his 50Th Birthday)

Not many years after its publication (in 1900), The Interpretation of Dreams fell into the hands of a young Budapest physician, who, although he was a neurologist, psychiatrist and expert in forensic medicine, was eagerly in search of new scientific knowledge. He did not get far in reading the book; very soon he had thrown it aside—whether out of boredom or disgust is not known. Soon afterwards, however, the call for fresh possibilities of work and discovery took him to Zurich, and thence he was led to Vienna to meet the author of the book that he had once contemptuously cast aside. This first visit was succeeded by a long, intimate and hitherto untroubled friendship, in the course of which he too made the journey to America in 1909 to lecture at Clark University at Worcester, Mass.1

Such were the beginnings of Ferenczi, who has since himself become a master and teacher of psycho-analysis and who in the present year, 1923, completes alike the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and the first decade of his leadership of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society.