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Baden Baden, November 8, 1923
Dear Professor,
It is a long time since I last wrote to you. I have thought of you rather more often. Indeed, the thought of Freud never leaves me.
In spite of all the strange happenings in Germany we are still living our old lives. Work goes on, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Twice in the course of this summer I had the opportunity of watching pregnancy, birth and a baby's first week of life. The hunch that in the field of obstetrics psychoanalysis will prove to be particularly useful has been confirmed by this. The complications of pregnancy - both women were having their first babies, one of them was 33 years old - disappeared very quickly, in both cases birth was easy and quick, the older woman even cried, when the head broke through the vaginal exit: ‘Oh, how beautiful, how beautiful.’ I was strangely touched by the course of confinement. The common aversion among women to feeding their baby themselves was traced to its roots and eliminated, and with one of them, when lactation stopped for 24 hours, the secretion of milk started up again after it emerged that she harboured an old carefully concealed hostility towards her own mother. Yet above all I learnt to understand that quite a number of baby complaints are produced by the mother, consciously or unconsciously, and disappear after an analysis of the mother. It was all so very instructive that I began to wish for more technical ability in obstetrics. Then I would add a maternity hospital to my sanatorium without fail. There is still a lot to be learnt about the mother's and the baby's psyche as well as about the practice of obstetrics.
I have had a number of other experiences in my field of interest. The longer one is active, unfortunately, the less confidently one deceives oneself about one's own discoveries and the more difficult it becomes not to lose one's way in the labyrinth of the unconscious because of the multiplicity of routes. There is hardly anything th