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[Göttingen, October 1928]*
[…]† request for a word from me has led me to conclude that a letter of mine must have gone astray.
Well, now I shall give you another snippet out of K.'s analysis. Nothing really new; only I learnt—what was new to me—much from the connections between the analytic solutions and the artistic processes liberated by them.
Perhaps Anna has told you that my little patient's neurosis has unwittingly produced an artist of outstanding quality, although she is totally ignorant from the point of view of technique. One of her complaints used to be that she could not manage ‘hands’, and when she was speaking of this I was struck by her remark: ‘And so I hide the hands somehow in the dress’. I said: ‘That sounds almost as if the hands would be revealed if the colours of the dress were scraped off.’ She was visibly disconcerted by this and replied: ‘Yes, that is exactly what I do feel.’
Analysis soon revealed the old masturbation symbol of the guilty hand. Only she had not in fact suffered from a feeling of guilt, in