Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, July 25, 1923

Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse

Klobenstein, July 25, 1923
Hotel Post

Dear Professor,

Above all, I beg your pardon for having admonished you. I should have known that you could not be in a mood to participate in a celebration. I thank you again, and this time without reservation, for the great gift, which signifies for me a wish fulfillment that I had given up a long time ago. I must accommodate myself to the fact that you treat lightly the great material difficulty of this question. As you know, I am a curious person, who would like to know all kinds of things, but to whom nothing is more repugnant than aridly looking things up in literature. In the encyclopedia I would now have the learned friend who gives me short and to the point information about everything.

I have in any event—for my part—already taken heed of your admonition not to distract Rank, since I am occupied with writing the Theory of Genitality and the biological speculations.1 Rank's work has the effect of being a wet nurse in this; I would like—also on account of the historically correct sequence—for my work to appear simultaneously with his, if not before it. Sachs is not much of a disruption.

Right after my arrival, we—actually together, for the first time—looked through the would-be2 prize work,3 and find that it does not conform to the requirements of the prize topic, and can serve, at most, as a preliminary work for a future compilation.

Klobenstein is beautiful, but the woods are far away and dry. We see Frau Mathilde and Robert daily; yesterday we were in Kematen with them and the Ranks. The individual places in the woods evoke memories in me of conversations that we had with each other here.4—Apropos! Will you permit me, in the genitality work (in the biological part), to come back to the assumptions about Lamarckism etc. that we constructed jointly in Pápa and elsewhere?

Many kind regards from your

now really old

Ferenczi