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Let us now return to the historical difference between Freud and Ferenczi where we left it at the end of Chapter 19. The technical problem of how to respond to a regressed patient who had developed an intense transference, was perhaps the major cause of this tragic disagreement. The impact of this event was so painful that the first reaction of the analytic movement to it was denial and silence, broken only in recent years, since when all sorts of fictitious statements about Freud and Ferenczi have found their way into print: Freud was described as a ruthless autocrat, a dictator (Fromm, 1963) and Ferenczi as a mean, cowardly schemer (Jones, 1957). Of course, all the monstrosities alleged are utterly untrue; what they show up is the difference between the greatness of the victims and the pettiness of their calumniators.
The clinical experiences discussed in this Part may give us some clues to the understanding of the probable build-up of the disagreement. I think that Freud in his early psychotherapeutic years encountered, almost exclusively, cases of malignant regression, and these encounters left a deep impression on him. Ferenczi, on the contrary, had some remarkable successes with a few benign cases of regression as well as some failures with malignant ones, but was so impressed that his well-known enthusiasm carried him away into an ill-founded generalization. Can these rather bold assumptions be substantiated from the literature? My contention is that there are a number of passages in both Freud's and Ferenczi's writings that point in these directions.
Freud's first experience with a malignant regression was in Breuer's treatment of Miss Anna O., at which time Breuer and Freud were already friends; we know from Freud's letters to his fiancèe, quoted by Jones (1953), that Breuer discussed his worries caused