Letter 692 Extracts from the Fliess Papers

… I will confide in you at once the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses]. This is probably not intelligible without an explanation; after all, you yourself found what I could tell you credible. So I will begin historically from the question of the origin of my reasons for disbelief. The continual disappointments in my attempts at bringing my analysis to a real conclusion, the running-away of people who had for a time seemed most in my grasp, the absence of the complete successes on which I had reckoned, the possibility of explaining the partial successes in other ways, on ordinary lines,- this was the first group. Then came surprise at the fact that in every case the father, not excluding my own,3 had to be blamed as a pervert- the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in which the same determinant is invariably established, though such a widespread extent of perversity towards children is, after all, not very probable. (The perversity would have to be immeasurably more frequent than the hysteria, since the illness only arises where there has been an accumulation of events and where a factor that weakens