ABSTRACT
The relationship between Freud and Ferenczi follows the trajectory of other early followers who were initially taken with Freud but later expelled from the movement when they challenged him. Their connection was special in many ways and has continued to elicit both clinical and historical commentary. For twenty-five years they were friends and companions, shared ideas and projects, worked together in the psychoanalytic movement, and discussed their personal affairs. Freud hoped that Ferenczi might marry his eldest daughter Mathilda and, at a later time, was therapist and adviser to his Hungarian colleague, his mistress Gizella Palos, and her daughter Elma. He wrote more letters to Ferenczi than to any other correspondent. As was the case with C. G. Jung and Otto Rank, their closeness required that Ferenczi remain a dutiful, admiring, son-disciple, a role for which his own background made him ideally suited. He was the eighth of twelve children whose father, to whom he was close, died when he was fifteen. This left him with an over-burdened mother who he described as a harsh and severe disciplinarian. He emerged from this background with a great need to be loved, and Freud became the paramount authority in his life—in some ways his therapist—and psychoanalysis his calling and belief system. At the same time he was a man of originality and creativity who searched for better ways to understand both himself and his patients. During the final years of his life he was engaged in experiments with psychoanalytic technique that took him far from Freud’s orthodox position. His late papers, along with the Diary he wrote in 1932, contained new ideas and methods that anticipate significant contemporary developments in the field, as found in self-psychology, relational psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, and control mastery theory. These set him on a collision course with “The Professor”, as Freud was called by his loyal followers.
