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Vienna, April 1, 1919
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
Easter Monday1 is so peaceful that it can justify a letter without motive as well as without content. To be sure, I received from you today a clipping from a German medical journal2 which bears witness to the fact that German science appears to be getting close to ΨA, but this occurrence itself is a matter of such indifference to me, and the emergence of that swine Friedländer arouses so much disgust in me which I haven't spat out that I have not been stimulated by it to play a more active part in world events. The overly great tension, the insight into the helplessness, inability to know what to do, and lack of understanding about everything that is happening makes one apathetic in the end and casts one back onto one's own discomfort, which is motivated by little worries and disruptions in diet and health. Recently I did have a nice day, when Rank was here. But Sachs is not a complete substitute for him, with all his uprightness and ability. Otherwise, I am living in solitude, when I have my ten torments behind me, and I don't like to think about new work.
In a few weeks a member of your Society will be cured of his excursion into psychosis and will return to you as a halfway analyzed neurotic, Anton Freund. Let us hope he is also well in other respects. In him I have found confirmation of a supposition about the origin of the infamous “feeling of inferiority,”3 which I am saving up for oral communication.
Ernst soon got over his acute feverish catarrh, but he has without a doubt a florid apicitis,4 which he is now making an effort to turn for the better.—