[Between Freud and Ferenczi: their patients. One aspect of their relationship]

The importance given to the subject of patients and their treatment in the correspondence exchanged between Freud and Ferenczi for more than twenty-five years (1908-1933) is one aspect of the very dense relationship established betweem the two correspondents throughout this long period of time. The exchanges on the subject of their patients deal all at once with their psychoanalytic practice and the clinical, theoretical and technical problems it involved. Countertransference and the question of how to handle it within the psychoanalytic cure provide the main thread in their constant questioning about their treatments. Thus, a number of cures examined within this correspondence--those of friends or colleagues such as Ernest Jones, Anton von Freund, Elma Palos and Eugenia Sokolnicka--involved in each case specific counter-transferential problems that are evoked and commented upon. However it was the analysis that Ferenczi underwent with Freud (between 1914 and 1916) that definitively marked the relationship between the two protagonists, as well as playing a determining role relationship between the two protagonists, as well as playing a determining role in what they were most given to share as from then, that is, their analytic passion.