Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, January 1, 1920

Vienna, January 1, 1920
IX., Berggasse 19

Dear friend,

Cheers to 1920, and may you, who are so much younger, still emerge from this sea of misery!

Your detailed letter, brought over by Lajos Lévy, makes no mention of my writing before the telegram (α, β, γ, δ); accordingly, I will repeat in more detail what I had indicated there. I greatly regret the impression that you didn't get further with Bódy;1 I consider him a cowardly and false beast, and I think one must approach him differently, in a more peremptory fashion. You seem to place yourself before him like humble audience-seekers whose suggestions he has no time to address, whereas you could deal with him as a party with equal rights. Your idea to call upon a privy councillor (Moravcsik) to act as a witness also seems to me to have fundamentally missed the mark. It's a good thing the result was only a refusal.

You know what is at stake for us in the big fund. Aside from its actual purposes, we need it as backing, since we have received fifty thousand more than the amount of the endowment, and we need it to pay the eighty thousand if we can really take possession of the (up to now untouched) foreign securities. The Verlag, I believe, no longer has that much cash in its possession at all. Even the document that Toni wrote up here anticipates backing by the big fund.

So I suggest that you no longer beg for a gracious audience with Bódy, but rather have Béla Lévy2 write him a formal letter in a resolute style with approximately the following content: you, as the authorized representative of the founder, do not delude yourself over the fact that the representatives of the city are assuming an inimically negative attitude toward the use of the fund intended by the founder and approved by the previous mayor.3

Bringing in a witness on the part of a person who is, to be sure, official, but protected by no knowledge whatsoever against the most common prejudices