Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, December 25, 1920

Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
25.12.1920

Dear Dr Pfister,

Your two Bircher books3 and your letter have just dropped in through the letter-box for Christmas. I have skimmed

through the two former and confess that they are very good, much better than I expected. They will provide a useful means of propaganda and education. I see that a volume by Silberer on the imp of the unconscious is announced,1 and I am curious to see how the fox will come to terms with psychoanalysis in the matter and how he will drag in his anagogics.

A few days ago I received the number of the Revue de Genève containing the first lecture of the Psycho-analysis,2 and a few days before that I received a Danish translation of it. It is true that things are moving everywhere, but you seem to over-estimate my pleasure in that. What personal pleasure is to be derived from analysis I obtained during the time when I was alone, and since others have joined me it has given me more pain than pleasure. The way people accept and distort it has not changed the opinion I formed of them when they non-understandingly rejected it. An incurable breach must have come into existence at that time between me and other men.

I watched your small battle with Rank from a distance, and of course was entirely on his side. You were wrong when you tried to pin him down to what he said at your inaugural meeting. All the circumstances have completely changed since then. Our crown, if I am not very much mistaken, still stood at between four and five centimes, and since then the expenses of the publishing house have certainly quintupled. It was therefore very unreasonable and unco-operative of the Swiss to ask for preferential treatment affecting our very possibility of existence instead of taking into consideration the difficult position of the publishing house. Every consideration would have been shown to an individual who confessed his pover