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17th November 1952.
Dear Melanie:
I want to write to you about last Friday evening's meeting,1 in order to try to turn it into something constructive.
The first thing I want to say is that I can see how annoying it is that when something develops in me out of my own growth and out of my analytic experience I want to put it in my own language. This is annoying because I suppose everyone wants to do the same thing, and in a scientific society one of our aims is to find a common language. This language must, however, be kept alive as there is nothing worse than a dead language.
I said that what I am doing is annoying, but I do also think that it has its good side. Firstly, there are not very many creative people in the Society having ideas that are personal and original. I think that anyone who has ideas is really welcome and I always do feel in the Society that I am tolerated because I have ideas even although my method is an annoying one.
Secondly, I feel that corresponding to my wish to say things my way there is something from your end, namely a need to have everything that is new restated in your own terms.
What I was wanting on Friday undoubtedly was that there should be some move from your direction towards the gesture that I make in this paper. It is a creative gesture and I cannot make any relationship through this gesture except if someone come to meet it. I think that I was wanting something which I have no right to expect from your group, and it is really of the nature of a therapeutic act, something which I could not get in either of my two long analyses, although I got so much else. There is no doubt that my criticism of Mrs. Riviere was not only a straightforward criticism based on objective observation but also it was coloured by the fact that it was just exactly here that her analysis failed with me.
I personally think that it is very important that your work should be restated by people discovering in their own way and presenting what they discover in thei