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Göttingen, 3 Sept. 1924
Dear Professor,
I suddenly found myself in the position of someone in the fairy tale of the tree with the golden leaves: the autumn ones, which are just beginning, fell like gold into my lap with the fifty-dollar note sent me by Eitingon. Was it not Anna perhaps who was responsible for inducing you to make this splendid gift, because she told you of the financial bad luck I had had with my patients recently? Despite this bad luck I am still earning something, and I am waiting for the lack of money in Germany to pass, so that I shall be able to get patients for the autumn or winter. I know of more than one who would like to come, but cannot.
And now I thank you again and again from the bottom of my heart, dear Professor. I intended to answer your last letter by return, but as what I wanted to say would have been in the nature of a violent protest, it ended by being a series of monologues with you. In your letter you described the sick man as a criminal to be punished—somewhat in the sense of Groddeck's view169 that the actual form our physical suffering takes is not a matter of chance. But I find this view even more horrible than the old prejudices of former times, according to which we are chastised for our psychical deeds with appropriate punishments.
For that is after all the most quintessentially human thing in man, that he both is and is not his own body—that his body despite everything is a piece of external reality like any other, which can be identified by him with the help of his sense organs from outside