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Budapest, February 23, 1909
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54
Dear Professor,
To my pleasant surprise, today I received a letter from Stein in which he asks a favor of me. From this circumstance I saw that he doesn't take the situation as tragically as I had presumed. Cheerfully, I seized the opportunity to agree to do him a favor (to take over his office hours at the health service) and to ask him at the same time to give me an opportunity to talk things over. The prospect of a halfway satisfactory settlement of this affair has put an end to the depression which has been hanging over me since this matter worsened.
My improved mood as a result of this could have contributed to my having completed a little work (Contribution to Knowledge about the Triggering Causes of Neuroses)1 —Jung wrote me2 that he will be in Vienna in March and asked me to meet him in Vienna. I agreed.
Stein was just with me and has dispelled our misunderstandings through personal discussion. Certainly, after what has taken place, an analysis with him would be out of the question. In the aforementioned work I want to focus on two observations—on the basis of several cases.
That often neurosis becomes manifest not through a further intensification or sharpening of repression but rather through a momentary slackening of censorship. Under the influence of a strong excitation of feeling, the complexes can seize dominance for themselves and impel the patient to an action (of a sexual or violent nature) that consciously strives against him. In a very large number of my cases (particularly in hysteria or anxiety hysteria) the lasting disturbance of equilibrium was the consequence of such a one-time discharge, which overcomes the inhibition.*3
In two cases the manifestation of the symptoms emerged as a “scheduled action” [Terminhandlung] in the sense of suggestion psychology. In our terminology I would define the matter such that, in some patients, the maturation of the illness is the fulfillment of a forgotten (repres