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Dear Friends:
It is a constant happiness to hear the news, now from Professor himself as well as from Otto and Hanns, of the steady recuperation of Professor, with the promise of an earlier return than was at first thought to complete activity.
To hear that any act or omission of mine, however unwitting, has caused pain to my old friend Sándor has greatly grieved me, but I can assure him absolutely that he is mistaken in his idea that the facts he quotes proceed from any evil intent on my part, either to deprive him of his just credit or, as he suggests, to appropriate this myself.
I have rarely been so astonished as on reading such an accusation for the first time in my life; first that it should be brought against me, who have earned a reputation for being punctilious in such matters, perhaps above the average; and secondly that it should come just from Sándor, where there was so much reason to the contrary. As he has brought the matter up I have the right to remind him of the following facts. If his theory of suggestion is familiar to the majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and, of course, psycho-analysts throughout England and America I can claim to have contributed a little to this desirable state of affairs: not only by having translated and got published the work in question, but also by writing a long essay in exposition and support of it, in which he naturally received the fullest credit. My paper of which he now complains appears in the third edition of my Papers next after this essay, which would be an idiotic act if I had the motives he ascribes to me. In this book there are many more references to his name than to any other author except of course Freud, more even than to Abraham and Rank. I quote these facts because I think they give an a priori probability that some other explanation is more likely than that I should have committed a misdemeanor so at variance with my whole life.
It is regrettable that even the shadow of a »priority« dispute should f