Gisella Altschul

‪Dispatches from the Freud wars Psychoanalysis and its passions‬ By John Forrester

We see Freud's authoritarian grip on the worshipful younger Ferenczi, and the latter's oscillation between self-abnegating obedience and guilty rebellion. Ferenczi's personal life is chaotic. He obsesses over whether to marry Gizella, with whom he has had a long, on-again/off-again affair, or the youthful Elma, Gizella's daughter, whom he has analyzed (and, to complicate the situation, he has also slept with Sarolta, Gizella's sister). While Freud says he knows he should not interfere in such matters, he -- who has analyzed Ferenczi -- campaigns unceasingly for Gizella.

Talking about himself (at sixty-one), as well as Ferenczi, Freud writes that Gizella, eight years Ferenczi's senior, "has already been [your wife] for fifteen years, became that when she was young and beautiful, has aged with you, and that should not be a motive for casting out one's wife after so many long years. . . . Incidentally -- she is today, with all the deficiencies of her -- merely somatic -- age, still worth incomparably more that most of the squeaky-clean and glossy women who get married" (p. 249). Source

Gizella Palos