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Budapest, March 18, 1923
Dear Professor,
I thank you (or Rank?) for sending in the first sheets of the “Ego and Id,” but I would like to call your attention to a small inconsistency in nomenclature. On page four you write (as you already often do) about the fact that “a consciousness of which one knows nothing… [is] a good deal more absurd than something mental that is unconscious”1 On page thirteen you write, “despite all voiced contradiction of an unconscious consciousness of guilt”2 I think you would have to ameliorate the judgment “absurd” (with ucs. knowing), if you only wanted to express formal reservations about the assumption of unconscious consciousness of guilt. Otherwise you risk having the word you use turned against your [own] term.
I am in complete agreement with the content and await the continuation.
Yours,
Ferenczi
Freud 1923 bp. 16, n. I.
Later altered by Freud to “this new discovery, which compels us, in spite of our better critical judgement, to speak of ‘an unconscious sense of guilt’” (ibid., p. 27; see letter 923).