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Göttingen, 25.viii.1919
Dear Professor,
Very many thanks for sending me the new edition of The Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life, and also for your comments on my ‘case’. Apart from helping me they have also made the anxious sister of the young man happier.*
Your news about poor Tausk came as a complete surprise to me. I was fond of him, thought I knew him and yet I would never never have thought of suicide in connection with him (to me successful suicide—i.e., not attempted suicide nor threats thereof—seems to a certain extent a proof of sanity rather than the opposite). It is true that I have no idea what method he chose (as a doctor he would have had very easy access to poison). If he shot himself, I can imagine that his death represented a last supreme libidinal satisfaction, namely, an act of violence and of suffering at one and the same time. For this was Tausk's problem, his danger, which at the same time constituted his charm (in non-psycho-analytic language it amounted to a frenzied soul with a tender heart). What you write: ‘that fundamentally you do not miss him’, seems to me not merely understandable; for I too felt him to be a kind of ‘threat to the future’ both for you and for psycho-analysis of which consciously none the less he was such an enthusiastic and genuine exponent. He knew my misgivings† about him, and my apprehensions about his determination to pursue an academic career in Vienna. In March he wanted to come to Munich; but I was against it. His last letter, like many earlier ones, I did not answer. And he was justified in writing a year ago: ‘No one wants the company of an unhappy wretch—not even you.’ No, not even I.
The really tragic and the really loved figure in this case is his