Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, May 6, 1910

Budapest, May 6, 1910
VII., Erzsébet-kórút 54

Dear Professor,

I seem to myself to be like an old railway engineer I know, who (retired after fifty years of service) stops in front of a locomotive standing on the tracks and cries out with naive admiration: “That's really a beautiful invention!”1:—For years I have been occupied with psychoanalysis from dawn until dusk, I am a wage earner of this method, it is my craft and my daily bread. But hardly a day goes by when I don't—sometimes in the midst of work—have to stop to admire the uncommon progress in the understanding of sick and healthy humanity. “It is indeed a beautiful invention!”

The occasion for this remark was provided by the impression I received this evening from a woman to whom I had been called who had fallen ill with overwhelming puerperal mania. I hadn't seen a mania for several years. And what did the same clinical picture that I perceived earlier as a strange conglomeration of inexplicable “symptoms” tell me now? At that time I was already preaching that there were no such things as “fools,” only mentally ill people. Only now do I see that I, like all preachers and paranoids, inwardly believed the opposite. Without Ψ-A, one must consider mentally ill people to be fools—people with “nonsensical” ideas and actions.

Instead of the “euphoria” from that time I saw erotic allusions, demands, gestures. Instead of “madness” I saw the elemental outbreak of violence, instead of “verbigeration,”2 unconcealed truths that the patient flung in the face of her surroundings.

They brought me the “puerperium”3 only in the way of an anamnesis. But in five minutes I got out of the family doctor the fact that it was a mariage de raison4 (she had a photography studio, he was her competitor and asked for her hand in order to unite the firms); that the husband did not bring about defloration (the introitus was “too tight,” she had to be