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Budapest, October 21, 1912
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54
Dear Professor,
First, I would like to give you a report on how I am. The physical determinant is quite unclear. It is most probably a small periurethral abscess with subsequent creeping infection of the neighboring lymph vessels and nodes. The symptoms (pain, swelling of the nodes) are gradually subsiding; the small joints, which were sensitive for several days, are no longer painful. Hypochondriacal thoughts come rarely.
I now hope to be able to carry out the work plans that I made. I organized the material for an essay on sleep (fetal regression) and began to read Jung's libido paper1 His errors already strike me in the first part. He doesn't know the unconscious! He identifies the unconscious with the pleasure principle (“fantastic thinking”) and consciousness with the reality principle (“directed thinking”). He thinks that the ucs. mode of working is operable only in the dream, in neurosis, etc., and he doesn't suspect that behind the most intelligent and most moral conscious thoughts of the normal waking person a substructure of drives, fantasies, can be discovered, without which that thought would never have come into being. But he also doesn't know the preconscious, and for that reason he is surprised that finished thoughts emerge from the ucs. [pcs!]2 That is the great marvel from which he and Maeder derive the great novelty of progressive ucs. thought work. (As if you hadn't done that a long time ago!) These people don't know that a progressive increase of accomplishment and raising of standards is a phylogenetic product of adaptation to reality, make a virtue out of a necessity, and assume, as it were, a certain moral drive that impels one to adaptation and the achievement of renunciation, etc., whereas in reality all that occurs out of egoism. In Part I Jung still writes rather correct things about symbolism that are well known to us. So I will be able to refute Part II by citing Part I. Here (in Part I)