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[Göttingen] 5.xii.24
Dear Professor,
Very many thanks for your letter. This one of mine follows as a postscript to my last letter. I had in fact already read your two last publications177 many times, but was still engaged in thinking them over. In each of them the basic theme is a source of positive satisfaction to me: in the first, your emphasis on the fact that ‘we never have to deal with pure life instincts or pure death instincts but only with mixtures of them in different amounts’. Our way of expressing ourselves psychically reaches in a libidinal sense to such a degree beyond our ego-limitations that it can use to its advantage intensifications of stimulus, including even pain and fear of every sort. At all times—and not only in the circumstances just described—it is a kind of attack on the ego, intended to eclipse it, despite the fact that they both coalesce for a certain degree of libidinal satisfaction, just as on its part the ego tries to attack the libido by its method of weakening the stimuli. Each of them tries to bring about the ‘death’