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[Budapest,] October 30, 1916
Dear Professor,
I have taken care of your request and had a flower arrangement delivered to Frau von Freund,1 which she is said to have liked very much. The price was 40 crowns.
The affects unleashed by the treatment have been undulating up and down in me. Whether I want to or not, I must admit you are right about the interpretation—. Gizella's refusal promptly rekindled all symptoms—but a more pleasant hour was able to banish them and make me happy with life and more or less capable of work.—
In the end it will turn out that in all the fifteen years I was actually never—or at least no longer since the neurosis—able to abandon myself fully to my feelings. In the final analysis, that card reader who prophesied that we will live together united as old people “under greenery” will be right. At the time I interpreted this as a fantasy of the grave.
A Herr von Selevér, who is now assigned to our hospital as an officer, will soon attempt to induce into treatment his bride, whom he made recalcitrant through precipitous tenderness (cunnilingus). She is said to be the daughter of an aristocrat; I don't know her name.
On this occasion I made the chance acquaintance of the brother of this Selevér, a private scholar, who told me that for seven years he has been working on a psychology whose main pillar is a physical conceptualization and explanation of the concept of censorship. He shared none of the details with me; he is afraid of losing priority.—All in all, evidently a philosophical crank, whose father complex reveals itself in the fact that he always designated you as “the old gentleman”—raving about your brilliance in the process.—For the time being I declined getting closer to him and postponed doing so until the time after publication of his book, which is already almost finished.
It is nonethelss remarkable what has been mobilized by psychoanalysis. The minds in Hungary are more or less under its influence.
Kind regards,
Ferenczi