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Vienna, February 26, 1916
Dear friend,
Since you have canceled your visit, I can write to you again briefly. All your communications have interested me uncommonly. But permit me to observe a benevolent neutrality, since, on the one hand, I am too lazy, and on the other, I would not like to disturb your beginnings. I can only reveal that I like most of them. The explanation of trembling as a definitive example of turning the action inward, in the Lamarckian sense known to us as “piétiner sur place,”1 impressed me. I don't know what to say about the case history and dreams. I will send you back the long letter after I have read through it again. Better yet, take it with you on Sunday.
An essay with preliminary communications about the war neuroses will be very welcome to the Zeitschrift. I assume that you will still keep your nice theoretical points of view there to yourself and only broaden the material in order to draw the next conlusions from it. No. 6 of the Zeitschrift (with the school of Bordeaux)2 came out today. The offprint by Kohnstamm3 is dilettantish nonsense, a wanting-to-be-original with borrowed goods. It stimulates views as to whether science can thrive at all in the democratic confusion of its operations. But, unfortunately, authority is even worse. Nothing can be done; you have to let every ass scream and every beast roar.
I can't remember having explained traumatic neurosis as a somatic representation of being dead, and would like to disavow it.
Not much new with us. Ernst will be here until the end of the month. He was in Hamburg and Berlin. Because of an attack of influenza it was