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[Göttingen, soon after 3 April 1931]
Dear Professor Freud—no, you must not be cross with me. Nevertheless, despite your severity your letter gave me infinite joy! It couldn't possibly have given me more on the day itself. I hardly know myself why I dislike special days so much. Even as a child I was against both Christmas Day and birthdays for this reason. Let me now say that I have been carrying around in my head a letter to you for some time containing two requests and that they are now easier for me to make since your kind letter of the wrong date. I hope you won't mind.
The first request is little short of an impertinence, but of course it is easy enough to turn it down. Perhaps you still remember a slim volume which I sent you before the war, Drei Briefe an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Boy)? The beginning of the book dates back to my pre-analytic days, but it was continued and completed during that happy six months in Vienna in 1912 and was intended to serve the sexual enlightenment of some children who were friends of mine. The firm that published it wrote to me recently to say that it had gone bankrupt and was being liquidated. I should not really consider it any great misfortune if my book was liquidated with it, but I must confess that it would give me some pleasure if I could see it resurrected in the psycho-analytic Verlag, provided that this—in view of its brevity and the small amount of paper and print involved—were to prove feasible.
It is of no importance whether your answer is positive or negative. The second request is of more importance. The matter arose thus: while I was lying ill a year ago I was very, very anxious to write a work which should bear the title: ‘Mein Dank an Freud’ (My Thanks to Freud).213 It wasn't a really satisfactory form of thanks, because it tried to do too much at once and, for instance, also tried to explain how it was through you that I first became free enough to appreciate those respects in which we feel differently abo