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[Göttingen] 14.vii.29
Dear Professor,
I have long been meaning to write to you, because I have been thinking a great deal about the picture which Thomas Mann205 gave of you in the introductory article in our new journal. Of course you have read it yourself? Although it is all too prolix and circumlocutory, it is by no means valueless. But what put me off in the
article was a certain reversal of the true situation, at least as it has always seemed to me. Mann evidently looks upon you as a thinker who is by nature secretly inclined to mysticism and obscurity, to whom he therefore gives particularly high credit for having nevertheless combated with might and main all reactionary tendencies and for having devoted yourself exclusively to the cause of progress. He does not realize that, as you yourself have described it, you originally not only had quite different plans than to pursue the ‘obscurities’, but also that your preoccupation with such things was often enough thoroughly distasteful to you, and that nothing was more truly abhorrent to you than the thought that your investigations might be grist to the mill of those who were mystically inclined. And what he further does not realize is how enormously important this very fact was in the creation of psycho-analysis—the fact, namely, that its creator was a man whose personal inclination ran counter to the dredging up of discoveries from such profound depths, and who, once these discoveries had been made, subjected them to a doubly exacting and sober scrutiny, so that their value might in no wise be overestimated.
For me this has from the beginning been of compelling significance. It enabled me to understand why earlier researchers in the field could never have made these particular discoveries, because for them these discoveries would involuntarily have become intermingled with all kinds of elements which would have lured the secret phantasy-wishes of the researchers to realms beyond sober scientific fact. (And which c