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DR. SÁNDOR FERENCZI
(ON HIS 5Oth BIRTHDAY)
(1923)
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Intentionally left blank
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(ON HIS 50th BIRTHDAY)
Not many years after its publication (in 1900), The Interpretation of Dreams fell into the hands of a young Budapest physician, who, although he was a neurologist, psychiatrist and expert in forensic medicine, was eagerly in search of new scientific knowledge. He did not get far in reading the book; very soon he had thrown it aside - whether out of boredom or disgust is not known. Soon afterwards, however, the call for fresh possibilities of work and discovery took him to Zurich, and thence he was led to Vienna to meet the author of the book that he had once contemptuously cast aside. This first visit was succeeded by a long, intimate and hitherto untroubled friendship, in the course of which he too made the journey to America in 1909 to lecture at Clark University at Worcester, Mass.
Such were the beginnings of Ferenczi, who has since himself become a master and teacher of psycho-analysis and who in the present year, 1923, completes alike the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and the first decade of his leadership of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society.
Ferenczi has repeatedly played a part, too, in the external affairs of psycho-analysis. His appearance at the Second Analytical Congress, at Nuremberg in 1910, will be remembered, where he proposed and helped to bring about the foundation of an International Psycho-Analytical Association as a means of defence against the contempt with which analysis was treated by official Medicine. At the Fifth Analytical Congress, at Budapest, in September, 1918, he was elected President of the Association. He appointed Anton von Freund as Secretary; and there is no doubt that the combined energy of the two men, together with Freund’s generous schemes of endowment, would have made Budapest the analytic capital of Europe, had not political catastrophes and personal tragedy put a merciless end to these fair hopes. Freund fell ill and died in January, 1920. In view of Hungary’s isolation from contact with the rest of the world, Ferenczi had resigned his position in October, 1919, and had transferred the Presidency of the International Association to Ernest Jones in London. For the duration of the Soviet Republic in Hungary Ferenczi had been allotted the functions of a University teacher, and his lectures had attracted crowded audiences. The Branch Society, which he had founded in 1913,¹ survived every storm and, under his guidance, became a centre of intense and productive work and was distinguished by an accumulation of abilities such as were exhibited in combination by no other Branch Society. Ferenczi, who, as a middle child in a large family, had to struggle with a powerful brother complex, had, under the influence of analysis, become an irreproachable elder brother, a kindly teacher and promoter of young talent.
¹ Its Inaugural General Meeting was held on May 19, 1913, with Ferenczi as President, Dr. Radó as Secretary, and Drs. Hollós, Ignotus and Lévy as members.
Dr. Sandor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday)
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Ferenczi’s analytic writings have become universally known and appreciated. It was not until 1922 that his Popular Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were published by our Verlag as Volume XIII of the ‘Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek’. These lectures, clear and formally perfect, sometimes most fascinatingly written, offer what is in fact the best ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ for those who are unfamiliar with it. There is still no collection of his purely technical medical writings, a number of which have been translated into English by Ernest Jones. The Verlag will fulfil this task as soon as more favourable times make it possible. Those of his books and papers which have appeared in Hungarian have passed through many editions and have made analysis familiar to educated circles in Hungary.
Ferenczi’s scientific achievement is impressive above all from its many-sidedness. Besides well-chosen case histories and acutely observed clinical communications (‘A Little Chanticleer’, ‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’, and shorter clinical works) we find exemplary critical writings such as those upon Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, upon Régis and Hesnard’s views on psycho-analysis, as well as effective polemical writings such as those against Bleuler on alcohol and against Putnam on the relation between psycho-analysis and philosophy, moderate and dignified in spite of their decisiveness. But besides all these there are the papers upon which Ferenczi’s fame principally rests, in which his originality, his wealth of ideas and his command over a well-directed scientific imagination find such happy expression, and with which he has enlarged important sections of psycho-analytic theory and has promoted the discovery of fundamental situations in mental life: ‘Introjection and Transference’, including a discussion of the theory of hypnosis, ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’ and his discussion of symbolism. Finally there are the works of these last few years - ‘The Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses’, Hysterie und Pathoneurosen and, in collaboration with Hollós, Psycho-Analysis and the Psychic Disorder of General Paresis (in which the medical interest advances from the psychological conditions to the somatic determinants), and his approaches to an ‘active’ therapy.
However incomplete this enumeration may seem to be, his friends know that Ferenczi has held back even more than he has been able to make up his mind to communicate. On his fiftieth birthday they are united in wishing that he may be granted strength, leisure and a frame of mind to bring his scientific plans to realization in fresh achievements.