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Göttingen, 21.ix.24
Dear Professor,
Your letter was a great joy, and were it not that I wanted to read Rank's book first, I should have replied to you straightaway. I finished reading it last night: somewhat perplexed, because I too kept looking for the ‘great discovery’. But I must have overlooked it somehow, for I didn't succeed in finding it. Anything he says in this connection with regard to dreams has always been in the dreams and deduced from them psycho-analytically. In my view the only difference between Rank's interpretations and those of others is that they are more isolated from their context—by which I really mean that I have no clear picture of the dreamer. She never becomes a truly living person; I only hear what she says and how I am supposed to understand it. I do not doubt for a moment the factual accuracy of what he says; that was always a distinguishing characteristic of his books—but hitherto what he wrote was based on a living idea, which was indestructible, because it was after all your idea. Now his work lacks inner credibility, for which there is no substitute.
Perhaps this is a mistaken impression, but it is there. One envies him the speedy (and no doubt actual) cure, but one does not see or experience anything (some short passages excepted). With regard to what you write of your anxiety about Rank, I thought after reading the earlier book170 that there was a somewhat different and deeper cause for anxiety than in the case of the defections of Adler or Jung— in the first place, because people will always take Rank as the person who really ‘must know’, who is the absolute and unconditional