Dear Sirs,

In her article in this journal on Freud's Irma Dream, Barbara Mautner (1991) adduces Freud's use of the word Kalle for bride instead of Braut as part of the line of reasoning for the proof of her hypothesis that 'Freud may have been haunted by the repressed memory of an incident of erotic aggression enacted by himself against his sister Anna when he was 5 years old and she 3 years old' and that 'this experience and its psychic ramifications make up the latent content of the Irma dream' (p. 285). She makes the following point. In a letter of 21 September 1897 in which Freud announced to Fliess that he was abandoning