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1st October 1957.
Dear Dr. Bonnard:
I am grateful to you for writing me about your proposed paper and its contents. I am glad you enjoyed your travel round the States, and that you survived your friends' hospitality.
In regard to my being the father of the mother, as you put it, I have no idea whatever. I think it very interesting when different observers come to similar conclusions, because it probably means then that they are objectively concerned with real things. For me it is of no importance whatever whether I said something first or whether it was first said by Spitz.1 What I said came as a natural development of my own way of approaching these matters. You can find traces of everything I have written later in things that I have written earlier, and I suppose it might be rather fun to go into these details, and if I liked I could claim that Dr. Spitz read something of mine ten years ago or that I read something of his at about the same time. I hope that you will simply not care two hoots who was the father and who step-father.
I think that you might be interested in a paper of mine on Maternal Preoccupation. I will enclose a copy along with this but in a month or two my Collected Papers (doesn't that sound grand!) will be really on the market as we have now finished the index, and at the end of this book you will find this paper on Primary Maternal Preoccupation.
I really quite liked your paragraph about these matters, which seems to me to be genuine Augusta Bonnard, influenced perhaps by Spitz and Winnicott, but probably something you would have