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Göttingen, 19 Nov. 1914
Dear Professor,
How nice it was to get your word of greeting today. Just recently I had asked Dr. Abraham31 which of your sons was at the front, and had also learnt that Dr. Ferenczi was there too.
Yes: what can I say of the ‘big brothers’! They have all gone stark staring mad. (But the reason for this is that states cannot be psycho-analysed.)
Every day one is confronted by the same task: to try and comprehend the incomprehensible. One works one's way through this cruelly destructive time as through a thickset thorn bush. I cannot think of any personal fate which could have cost me anything like such anguish. And I don't really believe that after this we shall ever be able to be really happy again.
When you wrote to me last in the summer we were thinking of conflicts of a different kind. But Wednesday Evenings still take place as usual, don't they? (even if some members are absent). If it hadn't been for present circumstances I should have been attending them myself this winter.
Would you be able to send me an offprint of On Narcissism: an Introduction?32 And to write a word of greeting on it?
With good wishes for yourself and all your family,
Yours,
Lou Andreas
Karl Abraham, 1877-1925, like C. G. Jung at one time assistant to Eugen Bleuler in Zurich, one of the first guests of the Society, practised from 1907 as a psycho-analyst in Berlin. Lou A.-S. had a high regard for him as an analyst and carried on a professional correspondence with him.