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Grundlsee, September 16, 1930
Dear friend,
Above all, many thanks for your beautiful words on my mother's death. It had a strange effect on me, this great event. No pain, no mourning, which can probably be explained by the secondary circumstances, the advanced age, the sympathy with her helplessness at the end. At the same time a feeling of liberation, of being set free, that I also think I understand. I was not permitted to die as long as she was alive, and now I may. Somehow, in deeper layers, the values of life will have been markedly changed.
I was not at the funeral. Anna also represented me there. Today she went on a Swiss-Italian tour with her friend Dorothy, for which I must only wish her better weather.
The gruesome newspaper reports about my health will also have reached you. I find them very interesting as proof of the difficulty in thrusting upon the public and people in general what they don't like. They are, you see, the reaction to the Goethe Prize, and may warn us about the deception which resistance toward analysis has left behind in a practically palpable way. The same character of reaction is also demonstrated by Bumke's1 speech, which I know only from a note in the Neue Freie Presse, as well as by the increased activity in the Adlerian band of apes, where they are now publishing about the meaning of life (!) and [about] homosexuality.2 In short, the Goethe Prize will cost us dearly.
The new views about the traumatic fragmentation of mental life that you indicated seem to me to be very ingenious and have something of the great characteristic of the Theory of Genitality. I only think that one can hardly speak of trauma in the extraordinary synthetic activity of the ego without treating the reactive scar formation along with it. The latter, of course, also produces what we see; we must make the traumas accessible.
I am pleased that you are working. I am not amounting to anything, what with the congratulations for the prize, the condolences for my own fata