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Pápa, July 15, 1915
Dear Professor,
Let us hope you will still receive this letter in Vienna, so that I can still wish you a pleasant trip.
The personal news and reports about your family (with the exception of
your headaches, for which you really should go to my friend Neumann),1 have gratified me very much. Your Annerl's cleverness is becoming more and more worthy of respect; Oli will certainly build his way in life properly and diligently—as befits an engineer. Congratulate him in my name as well. The news about your sons Martin and Ernst (I mean the real, not the prophetic) is also gratifying.
I must tell you about the following remarkable coincidence:
At 11 o'clock on the evening of the 13th I told my new friend how remarkable it is that Nordic writers (especially Knut Hamsun2 and Selma Lagerlöf3) have such an excellent understanding of dementia praecox. I also said that it struck me that in the Zurich mental hospitals dementia praecox was so much more prevalent that in Hungarian ones. This illness is evidently the natural condition, as it were, of Nordic man, who has not yet completely overcome the last period of the Ice Age. I also reminded him of the peculiarly “magical” effect of the North in contrast to the magnificence of the South.—Naturally I then pursued the subject in the direction with which I am familiar, and looked for connections to the hibernation of animals; sleep and dementia praecox are certainly closely related to each other. Sleep is even the most successful dementia, etc. Today I received your letter with the wonderful linking together of all types of neuroses, all conceived of as phases in the development of mankind.—I also told my friend that ethnopsychology essentially depicts the relationship of the individual races to the Ice Age.
It will interest you as my doctor that the depression of the past ten days also immediately produced somatic reactions: the acute stomach upset that I went through was perhaps a small relapse to my earlier conditi