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Zürich,
29.4.1924
… The congress1 gave me a great deal. You were present in a much more real sense than at earlier congresses, at which the negative father transference kept peeping through. We were all of course tremendously pleased to see you there in person, and quite a number came especially in that hope. But everyone gladly granted you your well-deserved rest on the Semmering. Many of the papers gave me great pleasure. One or two things struck me as being too ambitious for a lecture, particularly the metapsychological. A danger that is still very noticeable is that of false generalisation; your pupils rush in where you weigh things up carefully. Jones traced back many character traits to the small intestine, Abraham favoured the beginning of the digestive tract, and Simmel either the middle or the whole end part of it. In this process someone ascribed a number of character traits to an organ to which someone else attributed entirely different traits. So far as I am concerned, someone can come along and describe the belly or the oesophagus as an element in character formation, and he can be followed by someone else who takes some other organ to be found in the neighbourhood of the alimentary canal, some gland or other, or the pituitary