Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, February 29, 1912

Budapest, February 29, 1912
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54

Dear Professor,

After a number of people declared the manuscript of my article on transitory symptoms to be readable, I have decided to send it in its original form and spare myself the displeasure that I would have had in writing out a fair copy.

Rarely has a visit with you given me such undisturbed intellectual and emotional satisfaction as the one last Sunday. The fault on some other occasions (Palermo!)1 lay not in you, of course, but in me. For some time, however, I have been feeling so absolutely free of inhibitions and resistances of any kind with respect to you that I can direct my interest unreservedly to our common intellectual and personal affairs. The striking and beautiful solution to the question of taboo (fear of temptation)2 has naturally made the greatest impression on me. The question of the differentiation of symbol, reaction, and substitutive formation still concerns me as well.—

This trip was significant for me personally, inasmuch as my doubts about the solution to the affairs of marriage have been laid to rest. What from now on speaks against marrying Elma, outside of the logical reasons, is also my inner voice, so from now on I am also affectively convinced that this plan should be dropped.

The editorial section of the enclosed newspaper3 (one of the most respected in Budapest) talks about you in dithyrambic phrases on the occasion of the publication of the Five Lectures in Hungarian; it talks about me as well. The beautiful Frau Dr. Stricker4 (who once looked you up in Vienna) is going to give the teachers a lecture on Ostwald, Payat (?),5 and you. In so doing, she is advertising her private school, in which teaching is being done according to your principles, and at the same time nudism and love of art are being advanced.

I read the galleys of “Imago” with pleasure. Robitsek's article about Kekulé6 was very interesting.

Kind regards,

Ferenczi