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29 May 1933
Vienna XIX. Hohe Warte 46
Dear Jones,
We have indeed every reason to condole with each other. Our loss is great and painful, one aspect of that change that overthrows everything in existence and creates room for the new. Ferenczi takes a part of the old era with him; then, when I step down, a new one will probably begin, in which you will still be prominent. Fate, resignation, that is all.
To be sure, the loss was not a new one; for years Ferenczi has no longer been with us, indeed, not even with himself. It is now easier to comprehend the slow process of destruction to which he fell victim. During the last two years it expressed itself organically in pernicious anemia, which soon led to severe motor disturbances. Liver therapy improved the condition of his blood, but had no effect on the other symptoms. In his last weeks he could no longer walk or stand at all. Simultaneously a mental degeneration in the form of paranoia developed with uncanny logical consistency. Central to this was the conviction that I did not love him enough, did not want to acknowledge his work, and also that I had analyzed him badly. His technical innovations were connected with this, as he wanted to show me how lovingly one has to treat one's patients in order to help them. These were indeed regressions to his childhood complexes, the main grievance being that his mother had not loved him—a middle child among 11 or 13—passionately or exclusively enough. So he himself became a better mother, even found the children he needed, among them a suspect American woman to whom he often devoted 4-5 hours a day (Mrs. Severn?).1 After she had left, he believed that she influenced him through vibrations across the ocean, and said that she analyzed him and thereby saved him.2 (He thus played both roles, was mother and child.) She seems to have produced a pseudologia phantastica; he credited her with the oddest childhood traumas, which he then defended against us. In this confusion his once so b