ABSTRACT

An enormous controversy surrounding the "Confusion of tongues" paper constitutes one of the darkest moments in the history of psychoanalysis. There has been much discussion of what separated Sandor Ferenczi from S. Freud as Ferenczi became more immersed in his work with the analysis of the incest trauma. On a fateful day in September of 1932, three days before the Wiesbaden Conference, Ferenczi courageously went to Freud in Vienna to read him his "Confusion of tongues" paper. There were some crucial issues between Freud and Ferenczi that set the stage for the suppression and censorship of the "Confusion of tongues" paper. R. F. Sterba remembered some presentations that Ferenczi had made before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that illustrated his dissident clinical theory and method. In 1931, on the occasion of Freud's seventh-fifth birthday, Ferenczi delivered his paper, "Child analysis in the analysis of adults"