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1.4.15
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dear Frau Andreas
I am going to use your letter with the kind postscript from your host as the occasion for a little relaxation, which is not so easily come by in these tense and anxious times.
I am delighted to hear that you have been so intensely preoccupied with the problems raised, for I hope this means that more will come of it than just a letter to me. I too in my way am continuing to work at it. You know that I concern myself with the particular, and wait for the general to emerge of itself. And so I find my views on narcissism very useful in investigating melancholia and other hitherto obscure conditions. The next numbers of the Journal will contain a kind of psychological synthesis of various ideas of mine under three headings: Instinct and their Vicissitudes—Repression—The Unconscious; incomplete, like everything I do, but not without some new content. The essay on the Unconscious in particular will contain a new definition of the term, which is really tantamount to a restatement. I shall ask your opinion on this (in six months' time!). Let us hope by then we shall have peace!
Dr. Abraham is at present in Deutsch Eylau (West Prussia). My eldest son has been at the front for two months now, probably in Galicia; he complains only of the vermin and the artificially induced illnesses after inoculation. My second son is in Klagenfurt waiting for further instructions.
Please tell Herr R. M. Rilke that I also have a nineteen-year-old daughter42 who knows his poems, some of them by heart, and who envies her brother in Klagenfurt the greetings he received.
With warm greetings and good wishes,
Yours,
Freud
Anna Freud.