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Göttingen, 18.iii.1919
Dear Professor,
Many thanks for your kindly interest in my difficulties. I should like to send you the girl's most recent letters to supplement my reports from her earlier letters (do not of course bother to return them, I know the contents), although the affair has found a speedy termination through her resistance. I wrote to her (she is a niece of mine four times removed) that if we struck at the very first resistance,
we should not be able to deal with the second and intensified one; one cannot of course exert pressure by letter.
Your remark that the transition from obsessional to hysterical symptoms permits a favourable prognosis would have encouraged me too, had not it become clear to me to what an extent these hysterical pains in the neck and abdomen at the same time serve an obsessional purpose: whereas formerly only occasional thoughts, rising up from the unconscious, demanded protective measures, things have now gone so far that any sort of reading and any sort of walking suffice to remind the head and the body of the ‘bad’ things which must be rejected by means of pain, with the result that her life now seems to be much more restricted than it was before.
It struck me further to what an extent the homosexual disposition is in fact equivalent to a purely narcissistic one: when the girl refers to ‘her’, she really means herself, and in order to be able to engage in phantasy she reverses the situation—sees the woman in question as suffering, passive and thereby exculpated, whereas she herself formerly wished to be the active and seducing partner; this passive and suffering element she then reproduces in her own physical symptoms instead of in the violation situation mentally attributed to ‘her’. And so in this phantasy alongside the identification with her father and her ‘masculinity’ she has also found satisfaction for her femininity. But it is wrong to take up your time with matters which could not, as it turned out, be treated in analys