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Pápa, July 24, 1915
Dear Professor,
Lacking better paper, I am writing on my ordinary note paper1 and intend to reply to your communications in order. I owe you a reply because I have been away for five days; they ordered me to Sopron (ödenburg),2 to function as a recruitment physician. There have been so many cases of bribery there (as elsewhere) that they are now customarily sending physicians from other garrisons to recruitment duty. I was also able to spend a day in Pest and in so doing circumvent the commandant's aversion to granting leave. But more about that later.
Your remark that you would like to have heard more critique about the plan of work that you call phylogenetic fantasy is justified. I was merely expressing my joy over the fact that my ontogenetic fantasies so quicky received a phylogenetic sister. Even now I cannot say much more, but I find the analogy between the presumed phases in the development of mankind and the neuroses extraordinarily seductive.
The anxiety phase, the hysteria and obsession phase—also, by the way, presumed in the case of the child—dawned on me immediately. What is quite new and surprising is the parallel drawn between the struggle against the father and the later types of neurosis. The religious phase of mankind (which still persists), with the exaggerated sense of sin, seems to be the last offshoot of melancholia. Psychoanalysis signifies man's convalescence, the emancipation from religion, from (unjustified) authority, and from the exaggerated rebellion against it; thus, the beginning of the scientific (objective) phase. Only the analogy between dementia praecox and the castration phase is not clear to me. The castrated ones cannot have reproduced and fixated their condition phylogenetically; therefore you must surely mean the fixation of castration anxiety. To be sure, the loss of the mother could at first have resulted in complete helplessness and regression to narcissism on the part of the expelled sons. But the question i