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[Göttingen] 3 May 1930
Dear Professor,
The time has come again to send you congratulations for 6th May, and to celebrate the event I am actually sitting in front of a bottle of ink and shall probably make blots through sheer lack of practice; but I do not know where you will be celebrating the day—the red-letter day of us all. Will you still be in Vienna, even though the blossom round the Havel lakes must now be at its most glorious?
Our garden is also doing its best, and we even had a pair of squirrels nesting in it. They reared two young ones under our very noses, who then learnt to climb up the window frame of my study—that was indeed a delight to watch. And the birds, which are usually fed at this same window, flew undisturbed back and forth from the large pear tree, whose white branches brush right up against the window. I venture on this long-winded description of this great event, because I feel sure that your concern with the canine soul will have brought you close to animal souls in general (they are nearer to me, alas, than are the dubious human ones).
Incidentally I should like to tell you much more about the latter than is possible in a letter. Do you know that inter alia the last year's analysis of my little K. revealed something to me which I had not yet realized, at least not in that form: namely, that her father-tie in the female sense was preceded in the first two years of childhood by the idea that it was her father who gave birth, and his penis was at the same time his child, whereas her mother only succeeded in producing dead stools of faeces and was correspondingly useless. The jealousy towards her mother only arose with the realization of the latter's capacity for giving birth. When at that time her father was suffering from haemorrhoids and in their concern for him they tried to make him comfortable by using two chairs, she imagined this to be a preparation for his confinement.
We know of course that boys start off with the idea of the woman wit