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Laubach (Oberhessen), 7 July 1919
Dear Professor,
As a result of the present breakdown in transport I have been stranded at a friend's house on my way home from Munich, and it so happens that she and I have been thinking a great deal about a case (her brother), which has been preoccupying me for a long time. For there is one particular aspect of it which puzzles me greatly: whereas it sometimes happens that a neurosis which finds expression in the sexual sphere does not, as a result of favourable circumstances, extend to other spheres (profession, etc.), in this case one has the impression that it extends to every other sphere except precisely the sexual, though the circumstances of the case would have led us to expect the opposite. The childhood of the man in question was characterized by father-protest, father-hatred and thoughts of murder. His ambivalent love attitude towards his father was transformed into jealousy on his father's second marriage with a youngish woman, when the son was twenty (he is now thirty), and from this year date the most obvious inhibitions (which are thoroughly obsessional in character). His schooldays passed quite smoothly, but even as a small child he had shown affectation, deceit, reserve, unusual self-control, even when dissimulating; alongside all this there was a certain apprehensiveness, e.g., in face of ideas of illness or death. Later (after twenty) two phases gradually emerged, in one