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Budapest, November 27, 1916
Dear Professor,
I will stay with this journal-like manner of reporting. Putting the events together serves not only communication but also self-analysis.
Friday the 24th was my last encounter with Gizella. After an extremely turbulent parting I separated from her for four weeks. She was gentle, fine, and good, as always.—After a somewhat more peaceful night and a bearable, albeit apathetic, morning, there came very sad hours. I went to the club in the evening but found all the men and women boring. Deeply sad music was constantly going around in me. Sunday together with a friend (the painter)1 and Ignotus. I had to force myself to talk. I see how every human, every intellectual interest on my part was concentrated on Gizella. It will require an effort to restore a part of my relations to the remainder of humanity.
Today, changeable mood. I made an attempt to displace the neurosis onto the somatic sphere (hypochondria), but I caught myself with this intention. I have, to be sure, constant heart palpitation. (The physical illness ought to force me to put myself into taking care of it again.)
The forceful disturbance in my libidinal economy temporarily succeeded in soothing me with the idea that I can have Gizella again in four weeks. I resisted the wish to shorten this time.—Insatiable hunger and thirst, disinclination to intellectual activity are further symptoms. Genital libido is silent.
There must have been something compulsive in the exclusivity with which I was tied to Gizella. Two cases are still possible, however: either the main thing proves to be the compulsion behind which no genuine love comes to the fore anymore, or there is indeed still enough left over, enough so that it permits me to live a life at the side of this incomparably dear woman.—In the end, of course, your—essentially correct, to be sure—opinion about our relationship—could be exaggerated.
The resistance which I feel against analyzing a brief dream which I experienced af