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27th January 1954.
My dear Scott:
I want to let you know that I have enjoyed reading your paper. It seems to me that probably the groupings in the Society on the whole are grouped according to type of clinical case as well as according to viewpoint. I myself find several direct connections between your paper and my work. Probably I shall think of some more constructive things to say about your paper in the course of time but the bit that I cannot agree with is your assumption about sleep. I feel that there is so very much more to be said about sleep that the little bit of truth in your “regression to sleep” reference gets lost. I doubt whether sleep is even the right word; at any rate I think that the sleep you are talking about is extremely unlike the sort of sleep that most of us have at night in which any dissociation between sleeping and waking is very markedly lessened by the dream that we more or less remember on waking, even if only for a second. The sort of sleep that you are referring to seems to me to be more of the nature of a depersonalisation or an extreme dissociation or something awfully near to the unconsciousness belonging to a fit.
I know that you have good clinical evidence for everything you say. Nevertheless I want to let you know that it is just at the point of your mentioning the word sleep that I get a jolt. At the same time I do not think that your idea is entirely wrong. As an example, I believe, of the sort of way in which these things can appear clinically, I would give that of a patient of mine who is dangerous just after expressing genuine love. In fact it was necessary for me over a long period of time to hold this patient's hands throughout the analysis, this being the equivalent of certifying her and putting her in a padded cell for the analytic hour. In this way she was able to proceed and to express love and hate. If I failed in this physical way then in actual practice I got hit and hurt and this did no good either to me or to the pa