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Semmering, August 14, 1925
Dear friend,
I am writing to you today on a quiet evening. Anna went to Ischl early in the morning to greet her grandmother a few days before her 90th birthday,1 and I want to have her and Lou, who in the meantime has arrived in Vienna, brought here tomorrow by car from Vienna. At night there was a railway accident on the line on which she is supposed to travel, so I—as a protection—lost my pince-nez with case as I was bending over in the woods. I would have to go back to the studio once again anyway, for, after an excellent week, there was again a bad one; the beast of a prosthesis is probably not sitting firmly enough.
Actually, the whole time I owed you a letter, which didn't come into being in my comfortable idleness. You see, my nephew Edward Bernays—but now it occurs to me, that is cheating; he was here long before you, and I told you myself about the acceptance of your name into the committee for the supposed American fund.2 So, the truth will be that I am pressed to write you because you praised both of my last works so, which, as is well known, is felt to be very beneficial in the midst of inner doubt, especially after previously reading some invective. I am naturally referring to the statements in your letter which arrived today.
My idleness here can be compared with the Russian form of government—an absolutism moderated by treacherous assassination—, for I have almost completed a third, larger work here, which will probably appear as an independent pamphlet. Name: Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety;3 character: a little speculative; genesis: in the manner of a newspaper serial in which the author allows himself to be surprised with every installment. The direction didn't come to the fore until the very end, unmasked itself as a criticism of the Rankian theory on the basis of a modified conception of the problem of anxiety. The stuff is so badly written that it will probably have to be rewritten; for a long time there was a question as