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20th June 1952.
My dear Ezriel:
I am rather anxious that the matter of your paper1 should not be left just where it is. From the way you spoke after the meeting I feel that you undoubtedly got a feeling of hostility and I think that the value of the experience of the paper would be lost for you if you were to let this become the main result. The point is that out of an enormous amount of sincere and hard work and original thinking you have presented a paper which is highly condensed and simplified and practically no-one understood what was happening. I think it can be assumed that this is to some extent our own difficulty in coming to grips with your language; I am not of course referring to the English, which is entirely clear, but to the medium of communication.
It will take me quite a long time to get as far as being able to discuss this paper with you in your own terms. Probably I shall try to get there and I am sure that it would be valuable if I can do so.
I would like to say something at the present time, however, which is my opinion about the difficulty that everyone felt last Wednesday. I think that probably there is something which the speakers, and those who could not speak although they would have liked to have done so, sensed but yet could not come to grips with, and this would probably turn out to be a real psychoanalytic difference of approach. I would suggest that the trouble is that the difference cannot yet be clearly stated by psycho-analysts because they have not yet as a body formulated the platform from which they can talk.
I would personally say that without explicitly stating the fact the psycho-analyst assumes that the beginning of the personality is unintegration2 and that without the unintegration beginning there is no resting place. (I hope you will understand that I am not referring to secondary chaotic states). You with your affection for gestalt psychology seem to me to be taking the pattern-making as a primary state, whereas for the psycho