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Pápa, November 23, 1915
Dear Professor,
In today's mail you will receive two kinds of mailings from me; the worse of the two is certainly the critical discussion of Mach's newest work.1 I was inspired to do this critique by 1) the book itself, 2) your praise of the Régis-Hesnard critique, 3) my flight from current tasks (I mean the bioana-lytic essays).
I am asking you to judge the critique as mildly as you are accustomed to doing with my things on only the second reading. (Does not a certain ambivalence on your part express itself in this?) By the way: Don't be mild, just honest, as usual.
Nonetheless, hope stirs in me that on a further reading my Munich lecture2 (which is in the editorial portfolio) will also find favor with you.
Am physically and mentally well; only now and then do I feel that working “l'art pour l'art” doesn't totally satisfy me and [I]—if I am supposed to work diligently—expect various real rewards from fate.
Kind regards,
Ferenczi
Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Austrian physicist, philosopher, and theoretician of science, representative of empiriocriticism, known especially for his investigations of sound and explosion waves and of air currents with flying projectiles. Latching on to Fechner's ideas about the interrelation of mind and body, he attempted to investigate the connections between physics and psychology and, in that regard, between philosophy and epistemology. From 1864 to 1867 he was a professor in Graz, from 1867 to 1895 in Prague, and from 1895 on in Vienna, where Ferenczi attended his lectures. See , “Sándor Ferenczi, Gedenkrede,” Zeitschrift 19 (1933): 305-321. Ferenczi's discussion of Mach's book Kultur und Mechanik (Stuttgart, 1915) was not published until 1919, under the title “Zur Psychogenese der Mechanik. Kritische Bemerkungen über eine Studie von Ernst Mach” [On the Psychogenesis of Mechanism] (Ferenczi 1919, 219). Ferenczi did not enclose the second paper he mentions (see letter 579).
See letter