Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, June 26, 1914

Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse

Budapest, June 26, 1914

Dear Professor,

I have rarely been so unsure about the worth or worthlessness of a work as I am about the enclosed.1 You can tell me your opinion without hesitation; I am prepared for the worst. I ask you to consider my courage in presenting it to you anyway as a kind of honesty which does not wish to hide even what is inferior. But I will also not conceal the fact that some of it appears to me to be important and correct in some instances.

I am pleased that I did the right thing with my suggestion to leave you in peace this summer. I can't very well postpone my vacation until September (—you already know, of course, that Budapest is not a proper summer resort in August—); so I will keep to the plan to leave here, where I won't have anything to do, on August 1. I will sound out Jones to see whether he is free at this time, and will possibly go to England, where I haven't been yet.—

I read through the “History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” again in one sweep. I find it excellent and am pleased that you didn't allow yourself to be softened up to make any changes. It can't fail to have an effect, and I am anxiously awaiting news from you.

Tomorrow I am going to the provinces to see my sister, who lives near Nyiregyháza,2 but I will be back Monday evening.

With kind regards to you and yours,

Ferenczi

A patient who has already been cured of impotence, who now has to live in abstinence owing to gonorrhea, delivered to me an important contribution to the regression of the genital to the oral. He has since often been preoccupied with his teeth; he constantly has to bite or gnash his teeth. I now think that even biting makes a libidinal contribution to the genital (see the analogy of rhythm while biting and during coitus), and that tooth symbolism finds its last source therein. So: a prospect for the uncovering of the organic bases of symbolism.