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Vienna, March 20, 1925
IX., Berggasse 191
Dear friend!
I advise you against it. Don't do it. Your experiences and experiments are certainly no more striking or unobjectionable than what has been set down about it in the literature, to which one has not wanted to grant one's faith up to now. So, the only thing new in your lecture would be the personal factor and the personal effect that would have to proceed from it. With it you are throwing a bomb into the psychoanalytic edifice, which will certainly not fail to explode. But we are in agreement in [our] not wanting to hasten this perhaps unavoidable disturbance in development.
Abraham has announced himself with his wife for Easter. But I will probably ask him not to visit me. I am too tired from the more than six months' work and the incessant treatment with its torments, so that I would like to take a rest over Easter in Vienna, or elsewhere, free from responsibilities. Abraham is an optimist, rather presumptuous in his relations with people, and he evidently cannot see eye to eye with the demands of my condition.2 You yourself don't need to see the announcement of a worsening of my condition in this communication. I am in a similar position as our poor Austria; I suffer the pains of rehabilitation, about which it has by no means yet been established whether it will succeed. Actually, Pichler has been working on my prosthesis for weeks in order