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[Göttingen] 4.5.32
Dear Professor Freud,
Would that this birthday letter should find you already in your summer residence! No doubt you have been longing to get there, and the two dogs certainly regard the winter merely as a period of exile. Moreover the last time she wrote Anna announced: ‘Papa is writing’—and perhaps the two essays on types and female sexuality216 will be continued in your spring-like park?
I won't expatiate on them today; I am still reading them assiduously and quietly enjoying every word. But one thought in particular struck me as I read them, and this applies to everything you have written since the period of your ‘theoretical writings’ (which are all now appearing separately): namely, the thought that these writings must have had a particular charm for you when you wrote them, just because they represented work undertaken entirely on your own. What you wrote before that involved you in conflict and turmoil with all the others, whose participation and membership in the movement no doubt caused you terrible suffering. I still have the feeling that at that time, so many years ago, you consented very unwillingly to the sacrifice of your isolation and only did so because the cause at that point required you to make use of your followers in this way. Indeed, if you had not fallen ill perhaps things would not have changed much in this respect even at a later period.
And this suggests to me a fantastic comparison, which I will nevertheless venture to put on paper: your illness, and the tremendous interference this has caused you, this conflict of unceasing inner creativity and the physical distress which one cannot get rid of and which arrogantly demands its right and due attention—remind me somehow of the menacing situation which prevailed in those decades between the pupils who wanted to help and those who wanted to hinder. Obviously you are fated never to escape entirely from this sort of conflict, and your achievement will always have some quality of