Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, February 7, 1930

Berggasse 19,
Vienna IX,
7.2.1930

Dear Dr Pfister,

Outside it is raining, we cannot take Wolf1 for his usual morning walk because his inclination to eczema means that he must not get wet, and so I have an hour's time in which to answer your letter of yesterday without delay.

All the news that you give about yourself is not glad news, but what right have we to expect that everything should be glad? At any rate I am glad that you write about yourself and your work, your hopes and griefs. At a distance it is so easy to drift apart if one does not keep in touch, and there is a special value in personal relations which shared work and interests cannot completely make good; and we two, at this moment when we have become aware of the ultimate, fundamental differences between us, have particular occasion-and, I hope, inclination-to foster such relations.

You are right in saying that my mental powers have not dwindled with my surplus years (over seventy). Though they show the influence of age plainly enough. There are three ways of disintegration between which nature takes her choice in individual cases-simultaneous destruction of mind and body, premature mental decay accompanied by physical preservation, and survival of mental life accompanied by physical decrepitude; and in my case it is the third and most merciful of these which has set in. Very well, then, I shall take advantage of this favourable circumstance to reply to your brief and forbearing criticism with an even briefer modest defence.

I shall deal with only one point. If I doubt man's destiny to climb by way of civilisation to a state of greater perfection, if I see in life a continual struggle between Eros and the death instinct, the outcome of which seems to me to be indeterminable, I do not believe that in coming to those conclusions I have been influenced by innate constitutional factors or acquired emotional attitudes. I am neither a self-tormentor nor