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Zürich,
20.2.28
Dear Professor Freud,
This is the third week I have been in bed, and I am very annoyed that no-one has purloined and made off with my phlebitis. I have been using the rest chiefly to write my friendly criticism of you. I have been doing so with the greater pleasure because in it I do battle for a cause that is dear to me with an opponent who is the same. There is not much danger
of your turning up for baptism or of my descending from the pulpit, but among the points that bring us closer to each other there are some which are very important, and when I reflect that you are much better and deeper than your disbelief, and that I am much worse and more superficial than my faith, I conclude that the abyss between us cannot yawn so grimly. While I wrote I saw your picture smiling indulgently at me, but all the same I felt in a very glad mood. I very much hope that you will not take amiss what I have to say; I even hope that in spite of my friendly attack on you you will derive a tiny little bit of pleasure from it.
I am sending you the manuscript to give you the opportunity of letting me know if anything strikes you as unsuitable for publication, or if you think I have done you an injustice on any point.
Our difference derives chiefly from the fact that you grew up in proximity to pathological forms of religion and regard these as ‘religion’, while I had the good fortune of being able to turn to a free form of religion which to you seems to be an emptying of Christianity of its content, while I regard it as the core and substance of evangelism….