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Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
18.6.1911
Dear Dr Pfister,
As you are letting me see the proofs of your Gift of Tongues, I must show myself worthy of the honour and pick some holes in it, thus depriving myself of the pleasure of reading it straight through.
I received to-day the first set of galleys (up to 288), and my critical eye finds your interpretation of the vision of the devil (p. 285) too simple, too facile. The devil's wearing the innocent young girl's nose on his face as the ‘visible sign of his slander’ is too tamely expressed and too simply explained. Let us make a more plausible assumption, one which fits in better with our knowledge, and say that such a vision is not a simple wish-picture but the product of several conflicting stimuli with one of them predominating. In that case the devil would be a mixed formation, really standing also for the girl, and his nakedness is even better explained as a means of seduction than as a sign of her humiliation. Without this there is no explanation of why the devil should have got the girl's certainly very pretty little nose as recompense for his slanderous deed. The pious are not usually as generous as that in their ravings.
Incidentally, the symbolic representation of the genitals by the nose will—with the aid of the infantile element—certainly have been the reason why the nose was chosen from the girl's body. In short, the vision does not seem to me to have been fully interpreted, and it might be as well to express yourself more cautiously about it, or with some indication of the other probabilities. The beginning of the analysis of the crazy ‘speaking with tongues’ is terribly amusing.
With cordial greetings,
Yours,
Freud