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Vienna, 17.4.1921
Dear Doctor,
It is Sunday and I am treating the day as a holiday by answering your letter.
The five letters47 are charming, I have firmly decided not to let you go to another publisher. You are irresistible. Particularly when you talk about yourself. I must tell you that my daughter, who is so far the only reader apart from myself and who came back from The Hague somehow adversely influenced, has had the same impression.
Now I am very interested to see the sequel. Will you be able to melt the difficult material into a liquid flow again, and will you succeed, with all your capriccios, in making the piece of ground that you jump off from appear as distinctly? Your style is enchanting, your speech like music.
To talk about something more serious: I understand very well why the unconscious is not enough to make you consider the It dispensable. I feel the same. Yet I have a special talent for being satisfied with the fragmentary. For the unconscious is merely something phenomenal, a sign in place of a better acquaintanceship, as if I said: the gentleman in the havelock whose face I cannot see distinctly. What do I do if he appears without this piece of clothing? For ages now I have been recommending in the inner circle that the unconscious and the preconscious should not be opposed, but rather the coherent Ego and the repressed material split off from this. But that does not solve the difficulty either. The Ego is deeply unconscious, too, in its depths, and yet fused with the core of the repressed material. The more correct notion thus seems to be that the categories and hierarchies observed by us only apply to relatively superficial layers, and not to the depth for which your ‘It’ is the right name. Like this, perhaps: