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Semmering, September 13, 1924
Dear friend,
A passage in your letter which arrived today causes me to write to you that Frau Beate didn't go to Abbazia at all. The child is too ill, seems to have glandular fever. Anna visited her during one of our excursions to Vienna; incidentally, she got a cool reception.
The matter with Rank is getting darker and more uncanny. Now it looks as if he wanted from the beginning to establish himself on the basis of a new patent procedure that was kept secret, and requested your participation. I am surprised that you went so far along in this secret humbug! In my innocence I didn't even know that he was concealing so much. I thought the communication that all libido originates from the mother and the setting of a date were all his methods, and thus came to the conclusion that with that one doesn't alter anything essential in the course of the treatment. One can certainly say that such a procedure is also scientifically unheard of. It appears to me now like what was depicted in Victor Hugo's novel Les travailleurs de la mer,1 where an employee earns a great trust through decades-long correctness, only later to be able to embezzle a large sum. He then gets his deserts in the embrace of a kraken (giant octopus). Another of my presumptions is that he constantly wants to return to America, which can be connected with the invitation to you and the ensuing turndown. I can only imagine that my apparently imminent demise uprooted him so, and that my recovery upset his calculations.
I see I am boiling with rage. I still have difficulty believing that Jones's suspicions should have been right to such an extent. But it is also difficult to conceive of the present indications any other way.
The central point of the situation lies, as you yourself recognize, in his concealments. Certainly it will take time, even if he has inaugurated them, before experience gives one the right to make a judgment. So it is superfluous to beat one's brains out now, inasmuc