You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Vienna, January 4, 1928
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
Yesterday's mail brought two rare pieces: a report from S. Paulo (Brazil) that a ψα group has been formed there, which will apply for acceptance to the International,1 and your letter, to whose New Year's wishes I cordially respond, as [I did] twenty years ago. We are both certainly conscious of the
impotence of our thoughts and the value of our basic attitude. Your enclosed paper—here reinclosed—testifies to that superior maturity that you have acquired in the last few years and in which no one approaches you. The title2 is excellent and deserved to be applied to more. For my recommendations on technique which I gave back then were essentially negative. I considered the most important thing to emphasize what one should not do, to demonstrate the temptations that work against analysis. Almost everything that is positive that one should do I left to “tact,” which has been introduced by you. But what I achieved in so doing was that the obedient ones didn't take notice of the elasticity of these dissuasions and subjected themselves to them as if they were taboos. That had to be revised at some time, without, of course, revoking the obligations.
I still have to raise an objection to your paper, which obviously doesn't belong in any journal but our own, to the effect that it is not three times as long and doesn't divide into [parts] I, II, III. There is no doubt that you still have many similar things to say, which would be very beneficial to hear. As true as what you say about “tact” is, this admission seems to me to be all the more questionable in this form. All those who have no tact will see in this a justification of arbitrariness, i.e., of the subjective factor, i.e., of the influence of one's own unrestrained complexes. What we undertake in reality is a weighing out, which remains mostly preconscious, of the various reactions that we expect from our interventions, in the process of which it is first and foremost