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Vienna, October 11, 1909
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
At last I can pull myself together to write to you about your experience with Frau Seidler. I have now overcome the shock and am confronting the matter just like any other, which is not easy.
Let's sort things out:
Setting up experiments to find out whether she knows something about the future would be patent nonsense; we will permit ourselves to keep this prejudice in reserve. It should be kept out of all further experiments.
We seem to be able to presume with certainty that she reads. How she does it is rather uninteresting. But she is quite a stupid person, otherwise she wouldn't reproduce the names so precisely but rather be content with approximations. In the beginning I was very puzzled that she should
have guessed Vienna. I had forgotten that the name is printed on the stationery. This point can be decided by a simple experiment that you can commission your brother to perform. Carefully erase the place name from a real letter that you have received and replace it with another, or alter it by adding something if possible. Be sure not to explain the forgery to your brother, and you will see that she will name the wrong place and will have no suspicion of the forgery.
I also cannot exclude the probability that she can do something, namely, reproduce your thoughts, whose visual representation in her mind she herself does not understand. All other explanations, like enhanced sensitivity for mimicry and the like, seem to me first of all inadequate, and second, they presuppose a special psychic ability in this woman. The assumption of thought transference alone does not require this but rather the opposite; she may be quite an imbecilic, even inactive person who makes images of what would otherwise be suppressed through her own intellectual activity. In her intention to swindle and to play the magician, she then has the courage and the attentiveness to perceive what has come into being purely physiologically in her.