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Eichkamp
11. 12. 32
Dear Father Freud,
I have listened with emotion to the introductory words of the third part of the Lectures. It seemed as though you were speaking to me through the lips of my secretary and through me to the whole of the contemporary world. To think that you should have to invent a public for yourself-you who will have set the seal upon this whole epoch by the very fact of your having lived in it. I know and you know too that I am not exaggerating. How the educated man of today envies the contemporaries of Socrates and Plato; and yet in the figure of Socrates, Plato is only recording the change of consciousness that had taken place long before, the final liberation of man from associative thought, and the final establishment of causal-logical thinking. But you have won all alone the battle for analytic thought; in your single person you have combined the conqueror of this whole territory together with its explorer and cartographer; you have restored associative thought to man by incorporating it in causal-logical thought, without depriving it of its own character and by turning it into a therapeutic force for the diseased psyche. This is more than the achievement of Plato and his Socrates and it is inevitable that it should be so, for in you the logos of the West and the age-old current of knowledge from the East have been wrought into a unity. It is this unity which created analysis and it is analysis which can bring about the slow unshackling of mankind. That is