Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, July 24, 1921

Magyarorszagi Pszichoanalitikai EgyesüLet (Freud-Társaság)

Budapest, July 24, 1921

Dear Professor,

Now I would like to write you the long-heralded “intimate” letter. Unfortunately, I have enough material for it. We buried our mother, who died on Thursday morning after an indescribable death struggle, in Miskolcz on Friday. I was opposed to the transfer, but the rest of my brothers and sisters wanted to respect fully my mother's présumed wishes in this regard. Immediately after her death I had (after a dose of Adalin) the hypnagogic hallucination that at the burial, the coffin would fall out of the hearse and the corpse would tumble out of the coffin. Psychoanalytically seen, certainly an ambivalent fantasy: revenge up to the grave and the wish for her resurrection.—On the way to the cemetery (which is situated on a mountain), the coffin (in reality) was loaded onto a smaller car, but, because the coffin was large and was threatening to fall off, it had to be loaded onto the big car again. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, the latter proved to be too narrow: the foot sank to the ground, but the head didn't, so that the coffin stood vertically. They had to work for an hour until the difficulty was removed.—The rational explanation for all these disturbances is that