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[Göttingen, middle of November 1924]
Dear Professor,
Eitingon returned like a premature Father Christmas and through his magic conjured up fifty dollars on to my table. The result of this is that my wonderfully thin and light fur coat, which is several decades old, suddenly declared that its bare patches, on account of which it had been put out of circulation, could and must be repaired, whereupon I actually sent it to a furrier in Hanover. If I am able to flaunt myself round in it again—every winter I have missed it, being so light and yet so warm—then it is you who will be responsible for this extravagance. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having seduced me to this; amoral as I am, I always get the greatest pleasure from my sins.
Eitingon wrote to me about Rank's return home.173 It still seems to me incomprehensible. Can it be summed up in the old formula: ingratitude is this world's reward. In that case he would have renounced all collaboration in order to be able to give himself up henceforward to his own ‘greatness’. But no doubt it is true that we can no longer put any trust in him—this is also Eitingon's view— and for this reason alone he will have to be relieved of all his present responsibilities. What on earth has come over this bird of ill omen that he has given up what was the most precious thing in his life, namely, your trust in him? How can he imagine that he can replace that basis of his existence with his ‘idea’, even if there had been ten ideas instead of one? Where can one find a fibre of his being whose roots did not draw their sustenance from you and whose deepest ramifications do not lie within you?
When I recently reflected on the various ‘secessions’, among which, it appears, Rank must now be counted, what annoyed me more than anything else was the obvious error of many people— especially in fact of the ‘well-disposed’—in thinking that such defections were mainly caused by the notorious ‘Freudian dogmatism’. To my surprise in the last