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Budapest, [ca. June 5, 1910]1
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54
Dear Professor,
Many thanks for Leonardo. I have already heard everything essential about it from you personally, and yet it is only now that I have gotten the complete impression of your idea. Since our trip from Budapest to Komorn2 at night, where you first explained the idea to me, I have learned a great deal from my homosexual, and what appeared to me then as a possibility became the only possible thing.—The vulture fantasy can find no other explanation than the one that you give in your Leonardo.3
You are certainly not mistaken about the impression that the book will make. Nothing more shocking has appeared since “Little Hans”4 —shocking this time not so much in a moral as in a logical sense. People don't suspect that in mental life other than logical rules exist, and they will again make you out to be a dreamer and draw the most unfavorable conclusions about your other works.
What will happen with you will be something like what has happened with me, namely, that I—as has been confirmed to me by various sources—have been decried as a homosexual, evidently because I am concerned with homosexuality. You are interpreting a fantasy—ergo, you are a dreamer [Phantast].—And the funniest thing in all of this is that this error in thinking is made by none other than the logicians!
I found a passage in your Leonardo5 that also characterizes me: I evidently also belong to those who, gripped by the grandeur of the phenomena unfolding before their eyes, feel that they are too small and not capable of actively meshing in with the machinery of the world. I see, learn, find new things, but immediately spin everything into a great context which scares me away from coming to grips with it. So the things remain undescribed.—
In the last few months I have been occupied with a series of hypochondriacal anxiety hysterias, more often than not complicated by obsessional thinking. With great regularity I found in them the exceptional sign