Letter from Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé, May 29, 1918

29.5.18
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19

Dear Frau Andreas

For months now we have been at peace with your old fatherland, but it was just two days ago that an Austrian lieutenant brought me a letter from the young man from Odessa whom after three and a half years' treatment I had discharged as cured, as I thought, on 14 July 1914. Two weeks later he became my enemy, who might, for all I knew, have been firing at my eldest son. At his request I had written down a part of his case history, his infantile obsessional neurosis, and had sent it to the printer six weeks ago, in order that it might appear in the fourth volume of my Collected Papers. Not a line of course has so far been set up in type.

However, my young friend is alive, and, since our troops arrived in time, has saved his home and property. His wife is ailing, and he has just the one wish, i.e., two in one, to bring her here to the Semmering, and to discuss his experiences with me. He has applied for permission to travel here, and I have made out a certificate for him which the lieutenant who is billeted on him will turn to good account.

If your wish (along with the wishes of all the rest of us) had the power to transport you hither, the question I would ask you first of all would be whether you had expected that from your six big brothers, who were all so nice to you?

A case like that of your little boy who is afraid of all forms of plant life has never yet come my way. I have always considered the plant totems to be late and secondary. Here we must have recourse to the witch Prehistory or Phylogenesis, nor is it easy to say where we should look for the cause of the matter. But perhaps, if the child could tell his story himself, we might be able to understand something of it.

We shall again be spending part of our summer holiday in the Tatra. Here too the spring was lovely, but it was not able to penetrate through all the layers of impotent resentment.

Warmest greetings and good wishes,
Yours,
Freud