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[Sigmund Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé (presumably enclosing Bjerre's letter) soon after 15 January 1914.]
[Lou Andreas-Salomé to Sigmund Freud (no doubt after returning Bjerre's letter) with a request for an offprint of Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung (On the History of the Psycho-Analytical Movement) and with observations on this work, June 1914.]
29.6.14
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dear Frau Andreas
Despite appearances this letter of mine does not owe its existence to the way you tried to tease me gently in your letter. Rank with his usual kindness has taken over the mass distribution of the offprint, and I had intended after a suitable interval to ask you for your critical opinion of it.
This opinion has turned out much more positive than I could have hoped. But I assume that there is a reverse side to the coin which you have not yet shown. For it is by no means a pleasant business. Accusations and denunciations, unmaskings and admonishments—that is all very distasteful and not the sort of thing I enjoy doing. But it happens in life that one is driven to do precisely what one most abhors. I was only able to carry out this inescapable task by writing as if I myself were the sole arbiter involved and by concerning myself as little as possible with a jury to whose favour I might have been appealing. Hence I intentionally gave everyone a good clobbering and to my closest friends who needed no winning over I paid as many compliments as I chose. But all the same one cannot help feeling a covert desire to find out how the whole thing might appear to another person, to a judge male or female, and I confess that it is to you that I would most gladly have entrusted such an office.