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Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
18.1.1909
Dear Dr Pfister,
I cannot content myself with just thanking you for sending me your paper Wahnvorstellung und Schülerselbstmord.1 I must also express my satisfaction that our psychiatric work has been taken up by a minister of religion who has access to the minds of so many young and healthy individuals. Half in jest, but really quite seriously, we often complain that psychoanalysis requires a state of normality for its application and that the organised abnormalities of mental life impose a limitation on it, with the result that the optimum conditions for it exist where it is not needed-i.e., among the healthy. Now it seems to me that this optimum exists in the conditions in which you work.
Your name has often been mentioned to me by our common friend C. G. Jung,2 and I am glad now to be able to associate a more definite idea with it; and I hope you will not keep your future work from me.
With sincere thanks,
Freud