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Budapest, May 8, 1923
Dear Professor,
I wouldn't like to wait until Whitsun (when I will be in Vienna and see you), so I ask you to instruct me, if only in a few lines, about the operation that you endured.1 I fear that you will now have to renounce a main pleasure, namely, smoking, for a rather long time! Please enlighten me with regard to that as well.
Jones added a few lines to today's Rundbrief from England, in which he talks about getting me invited to the Oxford Congress as well.2 In consideration of your advice to cultivate every connection with England, I didn't out and out refuse, but requested detailed explanation about time, ameliorations of a financial nature, etc.
In the next few days I want to bring to paper a little technical contribution to “activity”3 and send it in to you and Rank for appraisal. I am curious as to what you will say about it.
I will save the second half of the “Ego and Id” for a few quiet evenings. But things are already humming all around me with “ego,” “id,” and “superego.”
Many kind regards.
Yours,
Ferenczi
The first operation on Freud's palate, an excision on the right anterior palatine arch for leukoplakia (the appearance of whitish spots on the mucous membrane of the mouth, often precancerous). On April 7, 1923, Freud had summoned his physician Felix Deutsch. Regarding the consultation, the latter noted: “Professor on April 7, 1923. It is terrible to get old—You will still see it. Regarding the illness: get set to see something that you won't like.—Smoking has rendered me so many services in life that I can only be thankful. It has given me the possibility altogether to work so much. I need a physician for what I have in mind: If the disease is malignant, then I will have to see how one can disappear from this world with decorum. The matter has only one catch. You won't know that I still have a mother; she is 87. It will be difficult to do that to the old woman” (Library of Congress). Evidently out of fear