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When, more than a dozen years ago, the first letters of Freud were published, they were acclaimed as a major source for the study of the development of psychoanalytic thought and have provided a unique opportunity to integrate with psychoanalysis the personal life and relationships of its founder. The first volume of the correspondence was followed by the dialogues between Freud and Arnold Zweig, Karl Abraham and Oskar Pfister. They all bear witness to Freud's extraordinary qualities, human as well as intellectual. But the letters written to and received from Lou Andreas-Salomé are not simply a companion piece to the previous volumes. More than many other of Freud's letters they convey his masterly use of language in all its aesthetic and emotional appeal. Lou Andreas already had a reputation as an author of distinction and a woman of rare charm when at the age of 50 she attended the Psychoanalytical Congress in Weimar, in 1911. She had read Freud. 'Ceaselessly concerned with psychoanalysis, with ever growing admiration for Freud's "ruthless constistency"', she put in her diary. Years later, in July 1929, when deep affection had drawn them so much closer, he told her in his uncompromising manner: 'My worst qualities, including a certain indifference towards the world, have no doubt had the same share in the end-result as my good ones, e.g. a defiant courage in the search for truth' (p. 182). Regrettably, the reader of this English translation is deprived of a metaphor the tenor of which is much more succinct and surely less conventional than 'a certain indifference towards the world' can ever reveal. Weltwurstigkeit is the German word, a spirited, good-humoured allusion of saying 'I don't give a damn'—though even this rendering falls short in transmitting the anal imagery of 'Wurst' ('sausage') in Weltwurstigkeit. In many more instances these letters have so much more wit and elegance than the translation shows. I refer to these limitations at the outse