Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, January 20, 1912

Budapest, January 20, 1912
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54

Dear Professor,

The reports about Elma actually don't surprise me. I feel that I have seen, in part, almost everything that you tell me about her and have in part had vague intimations about it but (probably in order to be able to keep her with me) have not been able to admit it to myself clearly and analytically and didn't want to have her confess it to me. About what you call peccadillos, I have often posed direct questions to her without having received proper answers. She brought me, among other things, a dream in which that dentist embraces her and she acts as if she were shocked by it, even though she wasn't. The associations led from this fragment of a dream to the theme of feigned virginity, and in regard to that she came up with the association that she had read a lascivious novel by Willy,1 in which a girl's first sexual intercourse with a man was described. “Elle ne cria pas” [she doesn't cry]—is written there, which she claims to have understood only later. In the same dream there were allusions to bleeding on defloration (red roses).—My therapeutic plan with Elma was such that I would counter her coquetry with polite refusal and in that way force her to come out with her true affects. In this stage of the treatment the misfortune occurred that the reins of my self-control fell out of my hands.

It doesn't actually surprise me now that Elma is not behaving like a bride. I know, of course, that by far the greatest part of her love for me was father transference, which easily takes another as an object. You will hardly be surprised that under these circumstances I, too, can hardly consider myself a bridegroom any longer.—I believe that Elma will profit greatly with you; it is truly fortunate for her that she could come to you; I hope along with you that she will overcome a portion of her infantilisms—among them also the fantasy of becoming my wife.—