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The author sees in Freud’s proposal of the essay prize in 1922 the reiteration of an earlier initiative, the promotion of the interest shown by Ferenczi in the “activity of the analyst”. He differentiates the active technique that he attributes to Freud, and no one else, and the “activity of the analyst” that Ferenczi was beginning to explore. The author then makes the hypothesis that Freud was worried to see Ferenczi, the faithful Freudian, pushing back the frontiers of metapsychology by postulating the existence of a patho-neurosis outside neurosis, which, logically, would call for a revision of the practice of analysis. Freud was alarmed to see Ferenczi tempted to rethink classical analysis in the light of his experience of war traumas and the discovery of the work of Groddeck. Hence his initiatives of 1918 and 1922 to prevent Ferenczi from distancing himself and going astray. The author shows, finally, that behind the concerns of the father of psychoanalysis lay those of Freud the analyst… of Ferenczi. The tormented end of this unprecedented and unique experience throws a different light on the matter of the essay prize. The article closes with a question: if, in 1922 and 1924 Freud clearly failed with the congress delegates of Budapest and Berlin, can it be said that he succeeded, paradoxically, with Ferenczi… who was the only one to respond to his question on the relations between analytic technique and theory?