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Göttingen, 15 Dec. 1917
Dear Professor,
Thank you very much for your letter. Afterwards I wondered whether I ought to have bothered you. Since ‘virtues avenge themselves’,97 as Zarathustra claims, the result is that I am now writing to you again about the little girl.
The card will more or less show you the terms we are on: the four-legged animal signifies a pleasant dream; for the bad dreams she chose—a stork. The text of the card she dictates to her mother.
Her mother and I had both thought of masturbation as the cause, but since I, in case of error, did not want to suggest it to the child, I tried to discover it indirectly by telling her my ‘most terrible’ dream, which, I said, consisted of a room where no one was present apart from me, but where nevertheless someone or something was looking at me while I slept, as if even the physical objects had got eyes—and then I had woken up with a loud scream. She was not only visibly embarrassed by this story, but could not even listen to it properly, trying as it were to escape from it, although she usually takes a malicious delight in hearing my ‘bad’ dreams, because she is anxious to win the ‘wager’ as to who will scream less.
The next time after this we engaged in mutual confessions: I told her which bad habit was the cause of my screaming, and that the latter would now stop in my case, now that I knew this fact, for in itself there was nothing bad about it and it was only the secrecy which made it so frightening. She admitted at first: ‘Yes, before the scarlet fever-but only then, never after.’ then she said: ‘I smeared myself.’ But that evidently went beyond what she was willing to admit, for she quickly toned it down: ‘I mean from the pot of ointment, you know, which is quite close. And perhaps powder too sometimes, I don't remember.’ Later she repeated very definitely and firmly: ‘So it was only ointment. Or at most powder.’
Although I now consider it certain that I shall learn more, and indeed everything, from her (I