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Vienna, December 6, 1910
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
Imagine that we are still in Palermo in the Hotel de France in the morning and I gave you the following contribution to the notes on paranoia. You see, I have just overcome an error that was holding me up at that time, and I can produce the following simple formulation.
Let us break down repression into
a)fixation, b)actual repression, c)return.
(Breakthrough)
[The significance of these terms is, of course, familiar to you],1 so a main statement goes:
Breakthrough occurs at the point of fixation.
This is already known to you [but unclear]. The obscurity lay in the relationship between repression and breakthrough; I assumed the same mechanism for both. That was misleading.
The mechanism of breakthrough is independent of that of repression. and now, the third: