Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, February 9, 1909

Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
9.2.1909

Dear Dr Pfister,

I have to-day re-read your valuable paper, on which I shall open a discussion to-morrow in our small circle,3 and I should like to hear more from you on the subject than I can

gather from the printed word and say more about it than can be put in a letter. Perhaps the opportunity for such an exchange of ideas will arise. To-day I shall confine myself to throwing light on the difference between your field of activity and the medical, as you can also confirm in Stekel.1

The permanent success of psycho-analysis certainly depends on the coincidence of two issues: the obtaining-of satisfaction by the release of tension, and sublimation of the sheer instinctual drive. If we generally succeed only with the former, that is to be attributed to a great extent to the human raw material-human beings who have been suffering severely for a long time and expect no moral elevation from the physician, and are often inferior material. In your case they are young persons faced with conflicts of recent date, who are personally drawn towards you and are ready for sublimation, and to sublimation in its most comfortable form, namely the religious. They do not suspect that success with them comes about in your case primarily by the same route as it does with us, by way of erotic transference to yourself. But you are in the fortunate position of being able to lead them to God and bringing about what in this one respect was the happy state of earlier times when religious faith stifled the neuroses. For us this way of disposing of the matter does not exist. Our public, no matter of what racial origin, is irreligious, we are generally thoroughly irreligious ourselves and, as the other ways of sublimation which we substitute for religion are too difficult for most patients, our treatment generally results in the seeking out of satisfaction. On top of this there is the fact that we are u