Introduction to The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, Volume 2

“‘Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,’ Reichschancellor Bismarck had predicted, ‘would ignite the great European War.’”1 The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, by a Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, on June 28, 1914, satisfies his condition. On that day, Sigmund Freud tells Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest, “I am writing under the impression of the surprising murder in Sarajevo, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.” So ends volume 1 of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence (January 1908 through June 1914). The unforeseen consequences to which Freud refers unfold in vivid detail in this volume (July 1914 through December 1919). Volume 3, next to be published, will begin in January 1920 and will include the period of growing tension and disagreements between the seventeen-years-older Freud and Ferenczi until the latter's death—at the age of fifty-nine—of pernicious anemia in May 1933. The entire correspondence is best understood if one considers The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1932) an integral part of the whole.2 Although Freud never saw the Diary, Ferenczi's candid expression of feelings contained therein, including criticism of Freudi, resembles the analytic and self-analytic parts of their correspondence. Thus, the Diary has the quality of Ferenczi's earlier efforts to communicate with Freud. Indeed, it serves as an epilogue, perhaps even as a “volume 4,” of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, as Michael Balint and Judith Dupont have suggested (see their respective introductions in the Diary).

In the historical context of the First World War, the content of this volume centers on Freud's fervent wish that his three enlisted “warrior” sons, his son-in-law, and his “problem-child” (Sorgenkind, literally, “worry child”) as he called psychoanalysis, should all survive the war. In addition to these concerns, this volume revolves around Ferenczi's three brief periods of analysis by Freud, one in 1914 and t