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Baden-Baden,
September 21, 1924
Dear Professor,
The oppressive foehn weather has driven us from Montreux to Basel, from there to here. Here it is very comfortable, and in Groddeck's house, pleasant. The massage, with which one strives to annihilate my (certainly much too ample) fat, is doing me good. Groddeck is very nice; I find he has always been true to psychoanalysis, believes now as before in its applicability in organic suffering—to be sure, mostly in combination with other methods. Kayserling was recently in treatment with him; his analysis seems to confirm your view about him in every point.
I wrote to Lou that she should come here as my guest for a short time; the first refusal already arrived; but I repeated the invitation.
It works out well that your trip home coincides precisely with my itinerary. We plan to arrive in Vienna on the 27th, and I want to resume work on October I. So I will probably get to discuss with you all the measures that need to be taken in the matter of Rank, without disturbing the peace and quiet of your vacation.—
I, too, fear that Rank has gone too far to be stopped and to be induced to turn around. In any case, we must wait for his arrival and his reaction to Eitingon's and my suggestions for mediation. But even in the very best case, this affair will leave behind inextinguishable traces in all participants, and the old blissful trust will be gone. Perhaps only when he comes out of the self-made atmosphere of overestimation (in America) will he be sobered to some extent and see that, aside from the scientific value of his discovery, the manner in which he wanted to launch his discovery was an impossible one. Perhaps! I say, for in his last letter to me he betrayed an uncommonly high degree of self-aggrandizement, combined with the tendency to undervalue everything else.
Despite the fact that it cannot be pleasant for me to turn my back on my friend and, since recently, my co-worker, I didn't hesitate for a moment to decide along these l