Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, July 3, 1908

Budapest, July 3, 1908
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54

Dear Professor,

I thank you cordially for your willingness to find accommodation for my little work. I prefer Bresler's Wochenschrift to a sexual periodical and permit myself to request that you send the article there.

To be sure, I am aware that this work does not get to the heart of the impotence question. That has to do with the question of the more precise pathogenesis of neuroses in general, the solution to which we are awaiting first from you. Adler's theory of inferiority is certainly not the last word on this contentious issue;1 it is actually only a broader extension of your idea of “somatic compliance.”2 Adler's weighty hypothesis (somatic inferiority—psychic overachievement) should not achieve general validity; it is just as easily possible that organic superiority causes the overemphasis. In addition to a quantitative factor (deficit or surplus of substance), the temporal disposition of one specific organ (in the sense of Fliess's doctrine of periodicity)3 could play a role, e.g., as locus minoris resistentiae [the path of least resistance] at the moment of a psychic insult. In any event, Fliess, to the best of my knowledge, knows only the periodic stress of body sectors and not of organs.

The vulnerability of organs may also come into consideration. The reflex function of copulation is probably the most complicated that the infracortical nervous system is capable of. No wonder it breaks down in so many neurotics.

We should perhaps approach the question of the constitutional factor by means of numerous family analyses and pay particular attention to cases where the family members were exposed to quite different influences of milieu.

The long and short of this lengthy discourse is, however, that I cannot say much about the essence of the pathogenesis of impotence; that is why I left these questions untouched. Perhaps I should have touched on them as questions to be posed.