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Göttingen, 19 October 1917
Dear Professor S. Freud,
I have just received your card. What happened with the ‘slip’ was this: at the same time as I was addressing my card to you, I was engaged in writing the sender's name on the back of some letters of my husband's, and I carried on with ‘Prof. Dr. F(riedrich) C(arl) Andreas’ a little too long—a little longer and I should have had the card returned to me. It was, however, a regular day of ‘slips’. Shortly before this I had broken a saucer while washing up. I was glad that it wasn't the cup itself, as I had an extra saucer in any case. I threw the fragments, as I thought, from the balcony into the garden, went back into the room, and, lo, the fragments were still lying on the table! I had flung out the undamaged cup instead. I have not yet discovered the reason for this day of slips; it was made up—which is seldom the case with me—of nothing but little self-injuries (in the case of the address it just stopped short of being one).
Despite the fact that I have just written to you as a result of my reading of Groddeck, I should have written to you again today in any case, for in the interval nos. 3 and 4 of the Ärztl. Ps. A.91 have arrived, and that is always, especially after waiting so long, like resuming a conversation. The persistence of anal erotism within mature sexuality has always struck me particularly in the case of the female sex, so your essay interested me very much. Castration anxiety in girls (e.g., after masturbation threats) frequently takes the form of a fear of being incapable of bearing children, and here the equation of faeces, penis and baby is still clearer: it is as if the penis remained inside the body and had not grown outwards as in the case of the boy, and every attack of constipation is a symbol for the difficulty of getting it out; the emphasis is on this aspect instead of on the threatened loss as in the case of the boy.
What emerges as something quite new, not arising from analerotic memories,