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Vienna, December 25, 1920
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
You give me the desired excuse for a Christmas letter by reminding me how different and how much more beautiful it was years ago. Intercourse also requires a certain continuity, and when one sees one another only at great intervals, it works like an intraurban telephone conversation, where one also never knows what to say. I find the passage in your last Rundbrief1 excellent, where you say that we are all doing badly, but our cause is doing well. It really is such that the cause is consuming us and that we are being dissolved in it, as it were. And it is probably quite right that it is, only I would have wished for the younger, second analytic generation to be able to resist the solution for a while longer.2
I don't understand anything about your illnesses and satisfy myself with the constantly repeated confirmation that they don't mean anything serious or threatening.
I accept my own sicklinesses [Kränklichkeiten] as unavoidable phenomena of aging, but I am very set against secret intentions of celebrating my birthdays. I presume that something of the sort, which is masked as a Committee meeting, has been planned, and I strongly request that you abandon it, otherwise I would have to place all my hope on Jones, who has already explained that he can't travel at that time. At the beginning of May I am also immersed in work, and there is little to be got from a meeting in Vienna altogether. I am in favor of a trip over Whitsun or a Committee meeting in place of the Congress in the last days of September. I would probably not come to the Congress in Berlin, should it be set for 1921. Abraham is very stubborn, but for me, not convincing.3