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Vienna, January 3, 1929
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
I cordially return your New Year's greeting and accept your promise to come to Vienna this month. I will have even less to do in the second half than I have now. Eitingon also wants to visit us around this time. As soon as I know his exact date, I will inform you of it so that you can meet or avoid him as you wish. He will certainly be happy to see you, for he asks about you in every letter.
The new year has already brought me a kind of grippe with excessive runny nose, so that I am not very well despite the better prosthesis. But that doesn't matter much to me, since I already have to consider any kind of being as a gift. Senectus ipse morbus.1
I think that there is also little else happening, or I am interested in fewer things. I am probably doing that in order not to have to—get angry so often and so intensely. I don't even write anymore myself.2 Occasionally people send me manuscripts, which I then read and criticize. But I don't want to preempt in this letter what we can chat about later.
With kind regards for you and your dear wife.
Yours,
Freud
Latin for “old age is itself a disease.” Origin unknown.
In the years 1928 and 1929 Freud wrote only a congratulatory address for Ernest Jones's fiftieth birthday (Freud 1929a).