Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, February 4, 1924

Vienna, February 4, 1924
IX., Berggasse 19

Dear friend,

I am writing still on the evening of the day when I received your letter because I am sorry that you are in distress and I don't understand you completely. Above all, you must let me know what I actually wrote about your joint work. I don't remember the quoted remark exactly and would not like to appear to myself to be two-faced. The one fact exists that I don't like it as well as at the beginning, before I had gained some distance from it. I would now make a judgment that it has its birth defect, in that it emphasized the “experience,” in the manner of a slogan, and overcame its dissolution too little, or not entirely. In the beginning I was probably too corrupted by the correction that you brought to bear on my former skittishness about “acting out [Agieren].”1

But now I wouldn't know how to say what I don't agree with. I have already shared with Rank and Sachs an impression that, on the path that has been broken there, one could come out of analysis, that it promises to be a path for traveling salesmen.2 But there is no doubt that it doesn't have to be that way. The warning ought to suffice.

My open criticism was related to your lecture, as you had requested it to be, and objected to the fact that you did not speak to the content of the book, but rather about active therapy, which, by the way, was the general