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Budapest, June 7, 1914
Dear Professor,
I am thinking a great deal about your paper on narcissism, and now and again things occur to me that relate to it. Since you have not yet (I think) finished correcting it, I would like to call your attention to a passage which could be misunderstood, but which can be made unambiguous by changing one single word.
You speak of two kinds of “end of the world” (that of dementia and that of being in love).1 The world actually only gets lost in dementia, while being in love has to do with the end of the ego, which can nevertheless bring with it no lesser cataclysms and can be just as revolutionary psychically as the regression to narcissism is in dementia.
This time I will spare you further derivatives of this subject.
Frau G. sends kind regards.
Yours,
Ferenczi
In being in love, the world is not destroyed, but the object of love represents the whole world to the lover.