The above is one of the countless solicitous questions directed by Max Eitingon to Sigmund Freud during the course of their correspondence, which extended over a period of over thirty years, from 1906 to 1939. It comes in a letter of 1 November 1919, and thus refers, in the misery of the immediate postwar period, to a matter of everyday concern that was at the time of existential importance.

Eitingon, who was born in Russia in 1881 and raised in Leipzig from the age of thirteen, had in fact been the first of the Zurich Burghölzli group around Eugen Bleuler to have called on Freud in Vienna, as a young medical student in January 1907, even before Karl Abraham and C. G. Jung. Nor did he ever allow this personal