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Dr. S. Ferenczi
vii., Nagydiofa-Utca 3.
Budapest, December 25, 1929
Dear Professor,
I admit that my intention to reply to you has to struggle with resistances. Being accustomed for a long time to being alone and settling everything in myself has the consequence that the machinery creaks to a certain
extent when one tries once again to communicate with someone.—It could be that—perhaps for purely personal reasons, or for ones that are complex-determined, possibly to spare you, etc.—I have suppressed something for which I didn't think I could expect any agreement or any proper understanding on your part; it could also be that my misgivings in this regard were in part exaggerated.—Be that as it may, now that the ice is broken, I want to share with you the essentials of what I know about myself.
The reference to my premature aging was, as I can determine from reviewing the facts once again (by asking my wife, whom I informed at the time), not literally so, and did not take place at one single time in the manner that I wrote to you; it has to do with the summation of several statements of yours about me which are separated in time. At one time, such a remark about my appearance, certainly dictated by sympathy, was in the final analysis a facetious reply to my remark that I am so gray. “You are white, I am gray,” is the way it went at the time. But it would be pointless to specify, with paranoid precision, what was said, or even meant; suffice it to say that I—evidently also pressed by my own anxious images about growing old before I had an opportunity to fulfill my tasks—took your statements to heart.—I don't know of any occasion on which I learned anything unfavorable about myself from your mouth by means of anyone else.
The repeated renunciation of the dignity of [being] president did, as you correctly surmise, hurt me; it also seemed to me that the last rejection in Paris—especially after Brill's visit in Berchtesgaden—was also no longer politically motivated: everything