ABSTRACT
Sándor Ferenczi’s article is a masterpiece of ambivalence, meta-discourse, and hidden messages. Ferenczi enacted a number of powerful, partly contradictory tendencies in various sceneries, including the dream itself, its self-analytic interpretation. Ferenczi’s extreme preoccupation with Freud might look unusual, but such a preoccupation is common in a particular situation: in psychoanalysis—where, in Freud’s words, “all the symptoms of the illness” are given “a new transference meaning”, and the “ordinary neurosis” is replaced “by a ‘transference-neurosis’”. The concluding remarks by the ‘analyst’ underline how well the ‘analysand’s’ “capacity for dreaming” succeeded in transforming the most unpleasant thoughts into a wish-fulfilment—that is, in confirming Freud’s theory.
