Books by Sandor Ferenczi

The author attempts to explain his approach to psychoanalysis, criticizes conventional theory, and depicts the daily challenges of a professional practice.

The complete correspondence spans the years 1908 through 1933, and thus covers the decisive decades in the early history of psychoanalysis. Volume two covers the correspondence of Freud and Ferenczi from July 1914 through December 1919.

The young psychiatrist from Budapest had studied medicine in Vienna, he had read The Interpretation of Dreams, and now he was to meet its author. Seventeen years Sigmund Freud's junior, Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) sent off a note anticipating the pleasure of the older man's acquaintance - thus beginning a correspondence that would flourish over the next twenty-five years, and that today provides a living record of some of the most important insights and developments of psychoanalysis, worked out through the course of a deep and profoundly complicated friendship. This volume opens in January of 1908 and closes on the eve of World War I. Letter by letter, a "fellowship of life, thoughts, and interests", as Freud came to describe it, unfolds here as a passionate exchange of ideas and theories. Ferenczi's contribution to psychoanalysis was, Freud said, "pure gold", and many of the younger man's notions and concepts, proposed in these letters, later made their way into Freud's works on homosexuality, paranoia, trauma, transference, and other topics. To the two men's mutual scientific interests others were soon added, and their correspondence expanded in richness and complexity as Ferenczi attempted to work out his personal and professional conflicts under the direction of his devoted and sometimes critical elder colleague.