Letter from Sigmund Freud to Georg Groddeck, November 15, 1920

Vienna, November 15, 1920

Dear Doctor,

I am glad that we have managed to tear such a beautiful and honest article40 from you. It has already disappeared into the editorial file and will leave it (hopefully) to be put into the second number of the new volume. Of course I know everything about your novel and approve of Rank's title. This moment a pretty cover illustration is being devised.

I cannot quite understand why you should feel a martyr because you had to accept our terminology. A residue of your first letter to me, a little bit of chalky dust from the gate through which you came into our little town! I said jokingly that you turned dogmatic and fantastic at the end of your fine, original, and freely sceptical article and invested our unconscious, which until then had been mutually understood though, thank God, provisional and indeterminate, with the most positive qualities from secret sources of knowledge. Now every clever person comes to a point where he starts to turn mystical, where his most personal thinking begins. But couldn't you perhaps change a few things in these last sentences, make a sacrificio d'emozione? It will be acknowledged with thanks.

Your words about the attractive prospect of a fuller exchange of ideas between the two of us have found a strong echo in me. Yet your resigned postscript is correct too. I am in the position of the Sybil of Cumae who wants more money for the last third of her wisdom than for the whole. I, too, am so impoverished that I have to sell the remainder of my working time and strength dearly; fortunately it is no longer a (full) third. The analogy also does not hold in that I do not meet any of the now so rare kings. Thus I gather money from colleagues and tradesmen.

With warm regards
Yours Freud

P.S. My daughter is still in Berlin and will be pleased about your kind mention of her.