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Csorbató, 13.7.17
Dear Frau Andreas
I have to disappoint you. I am not going to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, nor shall I deal out question marks, but I shall do what I have always done with your comments: enjoy them and let them have their effect on me. It is quite evident from them how you anticipate and complement
me each time, how you strive prophetically to unite my fragments into a structural whole. I am under the impression that this is true to a special degree since I began employing the concept of the narcissistic libido. Without this, I feel, you too might have slipped away from me to the system-builders, to Jung or even more to Adler. But by way of the ego-libido you have observed how I work, step by step, without the inner need for completion, continually under the pressure of the problem immediately on hand and taking infinite pains not to be diverted from the path. It seems that in this way I have gained your confidence.
If I should be in a position to continue to develop my theories, you may perhaps recognize with satisfaction several new things as having been anticipated or even announced by yourself. But in spite of advancing years I am not in a hurry.
I am stuck here in the Tatra, shivering. If there were such a thing as a cold paradise, it might well be here; but in paradise it must be warm, even rather hot, and there must be a mild wind, not a cold storm which tries to carry off one's notepaper as one writes. And if one is going to write at all in paradise, it certainly mustn't be in a Lodenmantel. The world blockade and the promise of sufficient food have driven us here. On the whole we are really quite comfortable. Csorbató means Lake Csorba. The summits of the High Tatra gaze down on me threateningly while I dare to criticize weather and climate.
Have I already told you that I have been proposed for the Nobel Prize?86 I don't think I shall live to see the day, even if they no longer continue to postpone awarding it.
With cordial greetings,
Yours,
Freud