Letter from Georg Groddeck to Sigmund Freud, December 18, 1924

Baden Baden, December 18, 1924

Dear Professor,

You are right, I have not written to you for a long time91. Ferenczi told me a few things about you and I hope he did the same to you about me. There is not much to report. When I heard that you were not coming to Salzburg I lost interest in the congress and rewrote the talk I wanted to give and put it in my files, a clear sign that I had written it with you in mind as audience. I also understand better and better that I love you but not the curious atmosphere of many congressional lions striving against one another. I am only friendly with Ferenczi, and he is nice enough to come and see me here. Otherwise I continue in my quiet course of practising medicine and admiring Freud from a distance. An interruption was a trip to Berlin with my wife where I much enjoyed giving a few quite successful lectures92.

My opinion of Count Keyserling93 is very subjective. Personally I like him very much. I do not know anything about his philosophy, but I was pleased that he did not at all mind my ignorance, not even after he had given me a few of his works and realised that I did not read them. His article on psychoanalysis94 I can also only judge subjectively. He talks so much about me95 that I have to assume that somehow he has played Judas in his conscience towards himself and towards me. But that would only prove the fact that he has a sensitive conscience, something I already know from the short time I treated him, and that I have made a mistake in the course of his treatment. I liked him because he is a happy enjoyable mixture of man and child in which the harmless and the kind, a small, boastful, intuitively reacting child predominates. This is the reason, I believe, for the astonishing influence he exerts on individuals and crowds. He knows how to create a contented equable mood at least for the time that one is with him, and if he ascribes this effect to his wisdom he indulges in his tendency to