Introduction to Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi Volume 3, 1920-1933

This third and final volume of the Freud-Ferenczi letters covers the period from 1920 to 1933. It includes some of the richest, most intense, and most poignant moments of the relationship between the two correspondents.

The personal, professional, and public events chronicled in these pages are so closely interwoven that I found it impossible to analyze their various aspects separately. So I will reserve detailed discussion for a few major episodes, and for the rest limit myself, at the end of this introduction, to recalling a few milestones that struck me as particularly interesting or important.

My aim is to shed light on five chief events of the period: the first appearance of Groddeck and his meeting with Ferenczi; Freud's illness; the discord between Freud, Ferenczi, and Rank, which was both a theoretical and a personal misunderstanding complicated by organizational conflicts (1924-25); Ferenczi's trip to the United States (Ferenczi's 1926-27); and finally the emotional upheaval between Freud and Ferenczi beginning in 1929-30.

During these years, Freud, who had been ill since 1923 and was increasingly weary and disillusioned, took part only halfheartedly in the internal polemics of the movement, even when his positions were clear and well argued; nevertheless, he weighed in forcefully on the question of lay analysis (1926-27). Ferenczi was more combative; his development and research occupy a major part of the correspondence of this period.

This volume opens shortly after the end of the First World War, the effects of which were still being strongly felt. On August 8, 1919, Ferenczi was dismissed from his university professorship in psychoanalysis and excluded from the Hungarian Medical Society. His public career ended, he devoted himself thereafter exclusively to psychoanalysis.

Nineteen hundred and twenty was a year of mourning for the entire psychoanalytic