… My self-analysis is in fact the most essential thing I have at present and it promises to become of the greatest value to me if it reaches its end. In the middle of it, it suddenly ceased for three days and I had the feeling of being tied up inside which patients complain of so much, and I was really inconsolable …

It is an uncanny fact that my practice still allows me a great deal of time.

The whole thing is all the more valuable for my purposes since I have succeeded in finding a few real points of reference for the story. I asked my mother whether she still recollected the nurse. ‘Of course’, she said, ‘an elderly person, very clever. She was always taking you to church: when you came back afterwards you used to preach sermons and tell us all about God Almighty. During my confinement when Anna was born,’ (she is two and a half years my junior) ‘it was discovered that she was a thief, and all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners and all