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13th October 1959.
Dear Dr. Jaques,
I feel like writing to you about your paper1 because I may have failed to convey to you that I found it to be a valuable contribution in spite of the fact that I questioned your statement about psychoanalysis being the most difficult kind of work (or something of
that kind of thing). I really am very interested in the development of your theme and I hope that you will yourself continue to write along the same lines. For instance, I would like to hear your comment on the difference between the work of a student and the work of someone who is in a job. I think you will easily know what I mean in that I am referring to the case of the eternal student who is able to work very hard indeed but only on condition that it is not a job.
I know that I speak in rather a flippant way at times, but I was really quite serious about the difference between doing an analysis and writing a paper. The kind of analysis that I do is carried along by the patient, not by me, whereas a paper is obviously not the same in this respect. I could have said that a paper that one is writing never turns round and says: “Hi! wake up!” Could it be that there are some people who do analyses in a more active way than I do and who do not lean on a process in the patient so that the analysis rests on the basis of work done by the analyst? I do not think really that this was what you were intending to convey. This is a point that the Society is very much interested in.
I hope you will gather from this letter that I am really very interested in your statement and I am looking forward to other papers from yourself on the same sort of subject.
With good wishes, Yours sincerely,