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Dr Ernst Westerlund--in Sweden called the Enköping-doctor--had his practice in the town of Enköping. Dr. Westerlund was known to be an excellent diagnostician; he had a very good reputation in Sweden and even abroad. He had a very personal and individual relation with his patients and the article describes a correspondence between him and one of his patients, Miss Augusta Jansson and is based on 150 letters from 1879 to 1923.

In April 1924 a 13 year old Greenlander died of tuberculosis in the hospital in Egedesminde. The boy had been transported on dog sled by the district doctor from the outpost Ikamiut two months earlier. Not because healing was considered possible, but because the conditions for nursing in his family's turf hut was too bad. The crowded living conditions in Greenland and the frequent hunger periods were the reason for the spread of TB, which in the nineteen twenties was the cause of 1/3 of all deaths. At the present moment it is psychiatric patients who take up most beds in the Greenlandic hospitals. The reason for so many patients with behaviour disorder is still--among other things--due to crowded living conditions but also to the sudden change in recent years of the way of living. The doctors living and working conditions in Greenland in 1924 were very different from conditions in Denmark which made it difficult to fill the vacancies. Nowadays doctors salaries are on the same level in Greenland and in Denmark, but a period in a Greenlandic hospital does not count very much for a doctor's special training, and when schools for children are not as good as in Denmark it is still difficult to get Danish doctors to stay in Greenland for a long time.

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.