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14th January 1969.
Dear Mr. Q:
Your letter reached me about six months ago, but a great deal has happened here since then. Not only was I not too well myself, but also I visited New York, and there became very ill for some weeks. I am now convalescent from this illness and that is why I have had time at last to settle down to reading your letter. Of course one can always read a letter through, but that was no good with your letter because in it you ask questions and raise problems that are at the edge of our understanding. It must have seemed “forever” that I have delayed answering, but here at least I am acknowledging your letter, and I may be able to venture some kind of a comment.
I am so glad that you found my attempt to state and to understand your kind of problem encouraging, and a little useful perhaps. You might find more help in a more recent book of mine: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. (Hogarth Press, London, 1965)—a volume in the International Psycho-analytic Library.
May I refer to the places where I speak of the unthinkable anxiety that some people have to carry round with them all their lives. My use of the word “unthinkable” might provide a link with your disappearing mind which you closely associate with the core of yourself. (In the book you refer to I wrote of a split-off intellect which bothers some people but this isn't just what you are referring to; you are talking about a loss of your capacity to be a whole integrated human being, containing and able to stand (tolerate) whatever anxieties (and good things) may be in your total makeup.)
It could be that if you are “all there” then sooner or later this anxiety beyond what you can tolerate comes over you, and you cannot hold it long enough to look at it and see what is the content of the anxiety. If you could do this you would find that it contains—at root—the deepest source of your own psychic energy, so that when you have to blot it out (or it happens to you that it get