Anyone who has read the Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi (Harvard University Press, 1988) knows what a service the editor, Judith Dupont, has performed. For she has made available a diary that not only reveals an intimate portrait of an original mind struggling to understand the uses and limits of psychoanalysis, but does so in a meticulous translation with footnotes that are as helpful as they are scholarly.
Dr. Dupont has devoted a good deal of her professional life not only to the publication of the Clinical Diary, but also to the translation and publication of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence. This correspondence of over 1350 letters covers a period of 25 years, from the time Ferenczi met Freud in 1908 until the former's death in 1933.
In 1948, Gizella, Ferenczi's widow wrote Anna Freud, telling her that she had all the letters Freud had sent to her husband. and asked Anna if she would be willing to send all the letters Freud had received from Ferenczi. Gizella wanted to publish them along with the Clinical Diary. Anna agreed and asked Michael Balint, Ferenczi's literary executor and former pupil, to direct the project, but then hesitated in selecting the letters for publication because they all seemed to her to contain too much personal information about the Freud and Ferenczi families and others still alive. Balint died in 1970 without either the diary or the correspondence having been published.
Enid Balint, Michael's second wife, revived the project after the death of Anna Freud. She, along with Use Grubrich-Simitis and Dr. Dupont, assembled a team whose purpose it was to try to bring out the Clinical Diary and the correspondence. The first volume of the correspondence will be published in German and French in 1991, with an English translation to follow (Harvard University Press).
Funding support has come from the University of Geneva, the Austrian Government, the French Martine Lyon Foundation, and collections from the psychoanalytic communities in France, Switzerland, and Germany and from the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society.
To facilitate the support of American Psychoanalytics for this project, a Committee for the Freud-Ferenczi Correspondence has been established. The organizing members are John Gedo (Chicago), Renee Gelman (BPSI), Axel Hoffer (PINE), Daniel Jacobs, (BPSI), and Lewis Kirshner (BPSI).