You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ammerswald,
16.8.1909
Dear Dr Pfister,
Yes, you can come and see me at any time, and I am delighted to hear from you before undertaking the journey across the barren waste of waters. You always make one cheerful, because you call into consciousness the things
which because of the unhappy human disposition are hidden behind small miseries and fleeting cares. I do not know what promises you left behind with my children, because I keep hearing things like next year I'm going with Dr Pfister, I'm going climbing with him, and so on and so forth. I dare not mention your 10,000-foot climb with your son, because it would rouse my boys' blackest envy, they would wish they had a father like you, who could still climb with them instead of being tormented by his Conrad1 and picking strawberries in the woods down below.
Am I really to intervene with my advice in your work plans? There is no need for you to follow it if other motives get the upper hand. I think the prize should be an entirely secondary consideration. If competing does not hold you up, go ahead and take your chance but, if it disturbs you, drop it. But get the work done straight away and do not wait for years before finishing it. Happy is the wooing that's not long in the doing, so to speak. Only while the first impulse lasts will you be able to do the work with so much freshness and vigour. If you go on working, in a few years' time you will see many things differently and more correctly, you will put individual problems in the foreground and suspect deeper connections, but then you will speak a language intelligible only to our community and therefore make no impact on the majority, while now, in the stage of transition between the traditional and the psycho-analytic way of thinking, you will have the subjective strength to carry the unconverted with you. That, in my opinion, is what you want to do, and the important thing is to provide the stimulus. Incidentally, you must have done an enormous amount of work if yo