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Eichkamp
5 March 29
Dear Professor Freud,
You will receive in due course a formal expression of our thanks for your kind words and for your decision to join our committee. But today I would like to answer personally and
tell you how much I (and my wife) are looking forward to meeting you. I do not know whether I told you when I wrote to you about Caliban that were it not for analysis I should never have regained access to my creative faculties and that your great discoveries and your methods have made me what I am today. But I will tell you more about that when we meet—such things must be told, not written. Pont und Anna contains in very disguised form an abbreviated narrative of this matter. But later and on a large scale I would like to give an outline of the cultural development of man or at any rate of Western man by means of a description of the development and cure of two cases of neurosis. I only wish that I could soon start on this novel which shall be central to my work.
Pont und Anna was really written before Sergeant Grischa and was published in 1925, but the general public wasn't interested in the book Regenbogen1 where it appeared. Now people's eyes are naturally open to it, but it is wrongly interpreted as being one of the sequels of the Sergeant. But you know the Europeans; there's no need for me to waste any more words on that topic.
I read The Future of an Illusion in proof, and was enchanted and stimulated to contradict. For I have naturally devoted much thought and intuition to this matter, and thanks to the analytic method, your method, I have made some discoveries which I would like to set out in an essay on the Divine. But I would first like to tell you my thoughts on the subject.
In the meantime kind regards, in which my wife also joins.
Yours gratefully
Arnold Zweig