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[Semmering,] Villa Schüler,
August 6, 1924
Dear friend,
Your letter just arrived, and since it is so intimate, [and] Anna, the mistress of the typewriter, [is] at a picnic with Lampl, I take it upon myself to prepare the reply which is supposed to greet you in Engelberg.
I too am very concerned about Rank. It is hard to make a judgment, since he is so discreet and uncommunicative. Something is happening with him under the influence of the ambitious little woman. His letters to me are rare, brief, and ill-tempered. It will certainly be taken amiss among us that he is also propagating his not yet proven innovation there in America. I already got a letter from Trigant Burrow, who expresses concerns similar to those of the Berliners.1 Naturally, B. is not the same as Abraham. If he [Rank] is asked how I stand with regard to the birth trauma, he must naturally say: favorably inclined, and I am becoming less and less so the further away I get from the first impression. He is going to pieces, I think, less from success than from not being analyzed. He remains a problem which must be grasped with loving hands when he returns.
To stay with the personal: I gave up Felix Deutsch as my physician, told him so, and since then I have received two long letters from him. The surprising impression from his behavior and utterances is that he has to be counted among the constitutionally stupid, a diagnosis to which one does not resort often enough. I have encountered unseemly indiscretions with him;2 in addition to that, he constantly brags about his intention to deceive me as to the nature of my illness. I have known from the beginning that I have an epithelioma, and had taken him on as a physician under the condition that he tell me the truth every time, so that I may know how I should react. So, I have once again deceived myself in a person; it is too late to profit from that.
I also received the clitoris paper by Narjani. If true, it is very interesting that the type can be characterized