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Noordwijk, August 20, 1910
Dear friend,
Many thanks for letter and affirmative dispatch. I ask you now to give me timely information as to when you are arriving in The Hague. Since I have to go there myself to withdraw money from my letter of credit, I could wait for your train at the same time.
Your—carefully preserved—observations on your masochist seem to me finally to shatter the doubts about the existence of thought transference. Now it is a matter of getting used to it in your thoughts and losing respect for its novelty, and also preserving the secret long enough in the maternal womb, but that is where the doubt ends.
Your newspaper extracts were very amusing. That philosophical animal skinner, who naively distributes immortalities, has evidently misunderstood the main thing in the interpretation of dreams, namely, interpretation, if he can doubt the necessity of “dream distortion.”1 He is probably a personal friend of Swoboda's2 and substitutes liking for understanding.
Very nice here, but occasionally so windy that one's existence becomes difficult. I will not be averse to opening up a new chapter on geography.
Kind regards,
Freud
Karl Schneider, the author of the “Wiener Psychologie” (see letter 160 and n. 1), was lecturer in zoology at the University of Vienna and a proponent of vitalism; see Ursprung und Wesen des Menschen (Vienna, 1908) and Vorlesungen über Tierpsychologie (Leipzig, 1909). In his newspaper articles he had designated Otto Weininger, after Freud and Hermann Swoboda, as the “third Viennese psychologist who is certain of immortality” (p. 517) and criticized Freud's theory of the dream as wish fulfillment, since some dreams can be understood as the satisfaction of a “spiritual need” (geistiges Bedürfnis).
In his article Schneider praises Swoboda's theory of psychic periods and his views on the dream. Hermann Swoboda (1873-1963), Doctor of Law and Philosophy; since 1905 Privatdozent in psychology