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Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
18.3.1909
Dear Dr Pfister,
Perhaps I cannot better express my thanks for your latest paper1 in the Evangelische Freiheit than by asking you to accept some observations that occurred to me while reading it.
I realised that your situation and public laid you under the necessity of withholding or censoring a great deal. That is always as painful to the author as it is to the understanding reader. The censor cuts into the flesh; what he cuts out is always ‘the best thing’, as the mocker Heine remarks. At one point, I think, you could have been more outspoken for, after all, ecclesiastical authority cannot object to the human phantasy's taking charge of the messages which it has no hesitation in so obtrusively proclaiming.
In the first dream ‘the young lady jumped into the lake, I wanted to go after her, but she kept herself above the water … she was immediately quite dry’.
Dreams with this content, as you certainly have long been aware, are birth dreams. Children come from the water, fetched by the stork. The bit of biological reality behind this is familiar to us all, hence the impulse to give children this piece of information. Thus emerging from the water is equivalent to giving birth. (As a consequence of the indissoluble connection between death and sexuality a poor woman who wishes to commit suicide can do so only by means of a symbolic performance of a sexual phantasy. She goes into the water, i.e., gives birth, or flings herself from a height, i.e., drops,2 or takes poison, i.e., becomes pregnant. Poisoning as a consequence of morning sickness is equivalent to pregnancy.)