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Berggasse 19, Vienna IX, 11.4.1927
Dear Dr Pfister,
Thank you for your autobiographical sketch2 and the complementary accompanying poem, which obviously accords with your idea of your outer ego. I read the prose carefully, and in doing so surveyed your whole development in my mind. Permit me to express one surprising thing that struck me in retrospect in regard to the first edition of your Psycho-Analytic Method. This was that you put up so much better resistance to the confusion of Jung than you did to the absurdity of Adler. To you love is the salvation of the world and the core of religion, but nevertheless you hesitated for a time in the face of a theory which denies love and admits no motive but self-assertion. Your dubiety in the matter fortunately belongs to the past, and I return to it now only because I still detect an echo of it in your present attitude to instinct theory. It is not correct that the instincts are never found in isolation; there are reactions in which one finds only one or only the other; and even if they never appeared in isolation that would be no reason for not distinguishing between them. Gold never occurs in nature without an admixture of silver and copper, but that is no reason for not recognising the essential differences between them. But I am in a very morose mood to-day, my prosthesis is tormenting me.
I gave your autobiographical sketch to A.B. to read, and