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Zürich,
10.9.1926
Dear Professor Freud,
I read through your kind gift1 at one sitting and with great admiration. You have never before written in such a readily comprehensible fashion, yet everything springs from the depths. As one of your first lay pupils, the book gave me unspeakable pleasure. Only one lacuna struck me. You mention educational cases, but not the enormous number of adults who are not ill in the medical sense but are nevertheless in extreme need of analysis; I am thinking of alcoholics, people with warped lives, those whose love life has gone astray, frustrated artists, etc. As all these come into the field of the cure of souls, I have a great deal to do with them, and I earnestly appeal to you to cast a benevolent glance at the analytic cure of souls, which is, after all, another of your children. Undoubtedly the cure of souls will one day be a recognised non-ecclesiastical and even non-religious calling. If only men can be made good and happy, with religion or without it, the Lord will assuredly smile approvingly at the work….
It is a great grief to me that the theologians are so backward and wanting. I have now been at work for eighteen years. The educationists have accepted a great deal, and I hear on all sides that analysis is engaging more and more of their interest. But the theologians are too involved in stupid squabbles about principles to care very much about the mental well-being of the laity-or their own. All the same, it has not been all in vain. I am writing an article on Sigmund Freud for the big encyclopaedia Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart….