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MY DEAR FRIEND,
I have been urgently pressed to make some written contribution to the celebration of your seventieth birthday and I have made long efforts to find something that might in some sense be worthy of you and might give expression to my admiration for your love of the truth, for your courage in your beliefs and for your affection and devotion towards humanity; or, again, something that might bear witness to my gratitude towards you as a writer who has afforded me so many moments of exaltation and pleasure. But it was in vain. I am ten years older than you and my powers of production are at an end. All that I can find to offer you is the gift of an impoverished being, who has 'seen better days'.
You know that the aim of my scientific work was to throw light upon unusual, abnormal or pathological manifestations of the mind—that is to say, to trace them back to the psychological forces operating behind them and to indicate the mechanisms at work. I began by attempting this upon myself and then went on to apply it to other people and finally, by a bold extension, to the human race as a whole. During the last few years, a phenomenon of this sort, which I myself had experienced a generation ago, in 1904, and which I had never