Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, February 11, 1908

Vienna, February 11, 1908
IX., Berggasse 19

Dear colleague,

I saw Frau Marton today. It is a [case of] mature paranoia and probably beyond the limits of therapeutic intervention; still, she may be treated, and one can in any event learn something from her. Her brother-in-law, the physician who accompanies her, is an ass; he will probably advise her to

do something other than what I have proposed. I asked that she go to the institution in Budapest and be treated there by you. To get her there we should employ the fiction, which has already been introduced, that her husband is the sick one, and that she should go along to look after him. After two days we could say that her husband was called away, and, as long as it works, we could keep her in an experiment to get to the bottom of her delusion. It is possible to influence her only in that way, not through logic.

From a theoretical point of view the case has confirmed what I already knew, namely, that in these forms of paranoia it is a case of detaching the homosexual component of the libido. In consequence of juvenile homosexual fixation, she is actually attracted to all the women with whom she suspects her husband of being involved. She struggles against this attraction and projects it onto her husband; her libido for her husband is strengthened by being detached from the women. By means of her jealousy she then realizes in her husband her youthful ideal of unheard-of potency, etc.1 —

I was very happy about your interest in riddles. You know that the riddle advertises all the techniques which the joke conceals. A parallel study would actually be instructive. No one has followed me up on aesthetic aberrations such as jokes.

Kind regards,

Your Freud