ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how Freud reacts to Sandor Ferenczi's new metapsychology. Freud immediately grasped the deep continuity between Ferenczi's Thalassa myth and his reformulation of the trauma theory. Interestingly, several years after Ferenczi's premature death, Freud began to reconsider his views. Freud's last piece of self-analysis was also informed by this posthumous dialogue with Ferenczi, especially by Ferenczi's idea that the "traumatic material" was not to be sought in the neurotic reactions but, rather, in splitting, fragmentation, and the psychotic turning away from reality. This was exactly the material that Freud revisited in an essay of far-reaching significance, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis", written in 1936 in the form of meditative open letter to Romain Rolland, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and scholar of Eastern religions, who Freud had already notably addressed in Civilization and Its Discontents.
