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Baden Baden, February 7, 1932
Dear Professor,
To go straight to the point: I do not expect you yourself to read the enclosed manuscripts but maybe Miss Anna has still got a soft spot for me in memory of our meeting in The Hague
which I recall often. I beg her to sacrifice a leisure hour and to report to you briefly.
I am in roughly the same situation as I was at the time of The Seeker of Souls, yet I do not know whether you can help me this time. It is possible that you are of the same opinion as I am that the material I deal with would be better published as the opinion of the slightly morbid Thomas Weltlein. But at the moment and probably for the rest of my life I lack the strength to tell stories and invent structures. This is why I have chosen the serious approach.
It is a book in which the idiosyncrasies of language and fine art112 are used to prove how close the connections between symbol and life have always been. Medicine, particularly in the first part, will only be loosely linked to it, yet at the same time I want to discuss the influence of the symbol on the whole of the organism and its individual parts113 - either in a volume on its own or in individual pamphlets. I enclose a sample of both projects, which might be sufficient to decide whether the psychoanalytic publishing house can consider the matter or not. The first chapter was accepted by Storfer114 for the psychoanalytic movement and will probably appear in the next number; I enclose the two following chapters. The fragments on vision give an impression of the second part. It is all very unfinished still and needs revision. I hope by autumn to finish the first part and a considerable chunk of the second.
The fact that I submit the work in the form of a monster and do not wait until the baby is presentable is due to the uncertainty of whether the publishers will decide in principle to publish the work. This should not turn into an obligation, it is merely a request. Since I know from experience how lo