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Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
5.6.1910
Dear Dr Pfister,
At last Sunday has come, giving me an opportunity to read through your Analysis of Hate and Reconciliation.1 Apart from that, I am looking forward to your worthy count, and shall decide after reading it whether to send it back to you for the Year Book.2 Its possible predecessor3 is already in your hands.
You ask me in your kind letter to tell you what I think about your Analysis and you put questions to me on the thorny question of transference. I can think of no better way of using this fine evening than discussing these things with you. Which shall I begin with, praise or criticism? You will certainly be more interested in the latter.
Well, then, I think your Analysis suffers from the hereditary vice of-virtue; it is the work of too decent a man, who feels himself bound to discretion. Now, these psycho-analytical matters are intelligible only if presented in pretty full and complete detail, just as an analysis really gets going only when the patient descends to minute details from the abstractions which are their surrogate. Thus discretion is incompatible with a satisfactory description of an analysis; to provide the latter one would have to be unscrupulous, give away, betray, behave like an artist who buys paints with his wife's house-keeping money or uses the furniture as firewood to warm the studio for his model. Without a trace of that kind of unscrupulousness the job cannot be done. The information you give is of course perfectly adequate to justify the conclusions you draw-I say that in all sincerity-but the true picture is not conveyed to the reader, who cannot identify himself with it with his unconscious and is therefore in no position to exercise his critical faculties.