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Zürich,
24.11.27
Dear Professor Freud,
If I express my sincere thanks for the warmth of your dedication, please do not regard it merely as a conventional reaction to a friendly gift. That you care for me a little gives me uncommon pleasure and makes me almost a little proud. As for what I think of your work, it is exactly as I foresaw. If anything surprised me, it is that I was so little surprised.
You have the right to expect complete frankness from me, and you know that neither my attitude to you nor my pleasure in psycho-analysis is in the slightest degree diminished by your rejection of religion. I have always emphasised that psycho-analysis is the most fruitful part of psychology, but is not the whole of the science of the mind, and still less a philosophy of life and the world. You are certainly of the same view.
I cannot have things out with you properly on the subject of religion because you completely reject philosophy, approach art in a way that differs from mine, and regard morality as something self-evident. I can understand an important natural scientist like Driesch,1 who went over to philosophy after a long and successful career in experimental research, much better than one who merely abides by the data. ‘Pure’ experience is in my view a fiction in any event, and if we look at the history of the sciences we see how doubtful is the reality hidden behind our so-called experience. And even this mixture of illusion and truth that we call ‘experience’ we acquire only with the aid of trans-empirical assumptions. Conceptions such as causality, the aether, the atom, etc., are certainly saturated with much bigger contradictions than those of the theologians, and you know better than I do how natural laws have been uprooted by present-day physics. In my view there can be no such thing as a pure empiricist, and a man who sticks rigidly to the data is like a heart specialist who ignores the organism as a whole and its invisible laws, divisions of function, etc. Th