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… ‘It was on November 12, 1897. The sun was in the eastern quarter; Mercury and Venus were in conjunction-’ No, announcements of births no longer start like that. It was on November 12, a day dominated by a left-sided migraine, on whose afternoon Martin sat down to write a new poem,2 on whose evening Oli lost his second tooth,3 that, after the frightful labour-pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a new piece of knowledge. Not entirely new, to tell the truth; it had repeatedly shown itself and withdrawn again;4 but this time it stayed, and looked upon the light of day. Funnily enough, I have a presentiment of such events a good while beforehand. For instance, I wrote to you once in the summer [Letter 64, p. 253 above] that I was going to find the source of normal sexual repression (morality, shame, etc.) and then for a long time failed to find it. Before the holidays [Letter 67, p. 259 above] I told you that the most important patient for me was myself; and then suddenly, after I came back from the holidays, my self-analysis, of which there was then no sign,5 started ahead. A few weeks ago [Letter 72, p. 267] came my wish that repression might be replaced by the essential thing lying behind it; and that is what I am concerned with now.
I have often suspected that something organic played a part in repression; I was able once before to tell you that it was a question of the abandonment of former sexual zones [pp. 239 and 241 above] and I was able to add that I had been pleased at coming across a similar idea in Moll. Privatim [privately] I concede priority in the idea to no one; in my case the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright carriage adopted, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive-by a process still unknown to me.