Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, December 2, 1910

Budapest, December 2, 1910
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54

Dear Professor,

The “independence” that you have granted me in the question of paranoia evidently doesn't agree with me. I have postponed beginning work

again and again with the most meager excuses—not a line of it has been written yet. But I consider it a favorable symptom that I worked myself up to writing this letter; I believe that I will now improve.—No doubt the bad mood that characterized your last letter has infected me. Perhaps, as in the case of the Russian, Naum Kotik,1 the “psychophysical emanation” has fixed onto the paper and infected me. I hope (also [!]2 with consideration for you) that in future your reports will originate from an improved frame of mind.

I frittered away the time that remained to me from analytical work on experiments with transference. For the time being nothing new to report about it—except perhaps the following supposition (already touched on with Kotik): if one is somehow upset and not quite with it (in regard to the experiment)—then one may be a good subject for emanation, but one is not suitable for perceiving. A calm mood is more favorable. The most sensitive are those in love (with the aid of their masochistic components). It is not beyond the realm of possibility that this “difference in voltage” and the thought transference conditioned by it also plays a certain role in ordinary life by influencing associations, and through them also mood, action, etc. Greater significance would accrue to it only in pathological cases.

The perceiving person reacts to the transference with his own ucs. complexes, but he chooses among these only those closest to the ucs. complexes of the one posing the task.

Here is such a case:

I am thinking of a woman whose visit I am expecting.

The homosexual patient is given the task of guessing what I am thinking about, and he produces the following associations:

1. A woman; she gives her child a lollipop.