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21.iv.18
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dear Frau Andreas
This time you will certainly not have held external circumstances to be solely responsible for the delay in my reply. From 27.2 till 21.4. it is I who have been the guilty one. This has been a troubled time, marked by a growing resentment against the whole outer world, which was no doubt intensified by the necessity of being kind and tolerant every day to ten human beings who had gone off the rails. And finally I had retained a vague memory that your letter had presented me with a problem which I could not even grasp clearly—one more reason for pushing it aside.
I don't know how it comes about that in these last few days the mists have begun to lift, and today at last they have lifted completely. Today I had another look at your letter, understood and enjoyed it, and knew at once what the answer should be.
In my view you are entirely right, and what you have discovered is one of the ways in which the precondition of hysteria yields to the precondition of the obsessional neurosis. I have just been looking through the case history which is destined for the fourth volume of my Collected Papers and which concerns one of your countrymen.102 There one can recognize another way in which the same transformation takes place. I believe that anything which threatens the value of the delicate and scarcely consolidated genital phase can in the case of suitable subjects produce a regression to the preceding anal-sadistic phase. In some cases like the ones you mention the intimidation of the hysteria can produce it; in others, without this, it is certainly spontaneous.
But another factor must be considered here. The obsessional neurosis is characterized by a relative precocity of intelligence development, hysteria by a relative precocity of libido development. If hysteria has first been established, and this is followed by an increase of intellectual strength in the ego, it now often replaces repression by regression, or else adds regre