You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Göttingen, 24.1.1918
Dear Professor,
I was very grateful to you for your letter and would like to have told you straightaway that the child was already cured of its symptoms, but I wanted to let some time elapse before I ventured to say so. But now I can do this, because for the last week, before the arrival of your last letter, she has not screamed any more, sleeps like a top, no longer fears the approach of night, looks blooming and is merry as a cricket. And masturbates vigorously. At least I conclude that in all probability this is the case from the fact that her candid confessions have promptly ceased along with her screaming and that she skilfully avoids any reference to the latter. Despite a tender affection for me (I rank fairly close after cats, horses and dogs) and although she regards me much more as a kind of fellow-child than as a threatening adult, she doubtless considers it safer not to venture on any enquiries as to whether I for my part got rid of my ‘screaming’ through being good or through being bad. And so there has happened what is, alas, apt to happen at the successful termination of a treatment: the disappearing symptom simultaneously closes a door behind itself, which then acts as a bar to any further investigation. The parents are quite satisfied with things as they are, but it would very much have interested me, with the assistance of this case, to have penetrated a bit further into the particular problem of child loneliness, about which we know so little. It has always made a deep impression on me when you talked about the wealth of experience which lies behind even so small a child as this; my own experience so completely bears out what you say, that this ‘past’ which the child already possesses completely decides its present, and that it already continuously transfers from this past on to present experiences, experiences about which the child's family all too naïvely assume that its reactions to these present circumstances are to be taken