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Göttingen, 3.v.24
Today, dear Professor, I shall certainly not succeed in finding the right words for what I should like to write to you for 6 May—it is good that it doesn't matter. One almost feels inclined to resort to the facetious expedient of sending empty sheets of paper just when one has the greatest need to communicate, leaving the recipient to read what he likes out of them. But, joking apart, I am sure you know what this last year has meant to me and how impossible it has been for me to write what I have been feeling in my inmost heart. There is only one further thing to say about it: it was not only in sympathy with you that I experienced this whole year of suffering, but I also experienced it for myself, as if I had actually endured it personally. For that was the unique thing about it for us (certainly not only for me), that whatever trials the future may hold, one has, as it were, overcome the most formidable vicariously—in view of how you yourself have overcome it.
The common humanity we share reveals to us what man is capable of, and the most precious gift which any one of us can give the other is to make the heart beat faster by the way one has endured and through what one has achieved. Perhaps it is precisely within the sphere of psycho-analytic thought (which you have revealed to us) that one feels most profoundly that each person endures everything for all the others and that no experience is ever wasted, but remains a permanent help and assurance. I was not formerly aware of this in this way; now I know it—I should like to think— for ever.