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[Vienna] 3.xi.1912
Dear Professor,
During the discussion2 on Wednesday evening you asked me whether I knew A. Adler's book. I should like to have said more to you on this subject and told you to what extent and in what respect it stimulated and confirmed me in work I am doing on certain matters which lie outside the scope of psycho-analysis proper and which have preoccupied me in the past.3 Now Dr. Adler has invited me to attend his Thursday Evening Discussions. I have not yet done so, because I felt too strongly the need to assimilate quietly the impressions which I had received from you the day before. And before I do attend them I would like to tell you how these impressions predominate in everything—even in what seems to deviate from them—that occurs in my Vienna visit and how they give my visit its decisive character.
In gratitude,
Lou Andreas-Salomé
The discussion between Freud, Paul Federn and Lou A.-S. related to ‘Adler's theory of inferiority in children’ (cp. Freud Journal, 30 October 1912). ‘Adler's book’ is his main work, Über den nervösen Charakter. Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Individualpsychologie und Psychotherapie (The Neurotic Constitution). It had appeared in the current year, and Alfred Adler had sent it to Lou A.-S. on 1 July with an accompanying letter which is reproduced in the notes to the Freud Journal. Lou A.-S. had asked Adler for some introductory literature.
Lou A.-S.'s last completed works of any size before her preoccupation with psycho-analysis were ‘Die Erotik’, 1910, published in Martin Buber's collection of social-psychological monographs ‘Die Gesellschaft’, and the long unpublished essay ‘Der Gott’, from about the same period.