[Ferenczi and Groddeck. A friendship]

The close friendship that developed in the 1920s between Sándor Ferenczi and Georg Groddeck was not merely a matter of personal sympathy. The younger man was a frequent visitor to Groddeck's sanatorium in Baden-Baden and the two men found that they shared a therapeutic and psychoanalytic attitude towards the patients that created a progressively widening gulf between them and Freud's paternalistic and authoritarian stance. Groddeck and Ferenczi both believed in allowing the patient to develop under therapy, promoting repression, permitting relaxation and freedom, creating a maternal space and finally attaining to mutual analysis. To the extent that the two of them encouraged each other in these convictions, Ferenczi's dialogue with Freud lost its momentum, finally dwindling into estrangement and silence.