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Baden Baden, 20.11.1920
Dear Professor,
Again I see from your letter how kind you are to me. The last
sentences of my article41 are not usable, if read senza emozione. I beg you to cut the whole paragraph and finish the article with the words: ‘emerges, that the psychoanalysis of the organic has the same theoretical laws and practical results as the psychoanalysis of neurosis’.
The matter is thus deferred, yet it is not over and done with since without ado and quite cheerfully I can forego the accuracy here where it would be quite misplaced, whereas I shall have to find an outlet for my mysticism, without which I cannot exist, somewhere else. This brings me to a matter I have mentioned several times before. For some years now I have been hatching out a book which will set out calmly and lucidly what I am thinking. I plan to shut myself away for some months in winter and get down to this work, but I am afraid you won't be very pleased with it because there will be a lot of mysticism and fantasy in it. It will be good for my relationship with you, if nothing else, to have brought this sea monster to light. I feel like a child whom people believe to have been good while it is really planning to do all sorts of things it knows will not be approved of by its parents, and this is why I want you to get to know the work. It will decide whether you can continue to allow me among your ranks.
I am well aware that behind this fear of losing your approval there is the wish to be free again. Yet this wish will not have any influence on my work, particularly now that your letter has drawn my attention to the danger of emozione. The wish to be great is still there in me and sticks its head out where it shouldn't. Then I find it difficult to be silent, merely because one doesn't quite know whether what one says is right. Too often I have had the experience that things which only one person can say have remained unsaid because of excessive caution. And at 50 one can still utter a cheeky