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.
10 December 1908
35 Chicora Avenue, Toronto
Dear Professor Freud,
Many thanks for your kind letter. How I admire your facility in a foreign language! Ability to speak or write German even tolerably is one of the things I greatly desire.
I meant to go to Boston and New York this week to talk things over and sound the feeling there, but have had to postpone my visit till after Xmas.1 I am not very hopeful of the present wave of interest, for the Americans are a peculiar nation with habits of their own. They shew curiosity, but rarely true interest (it is the difference between the itch of a neurasthenic and the [longing]2 desire of a normal lover). Their attitude towards progress is deplorable. They want to hear of the “latest” method of treatment, with one eye dead on the Almighty Dollar, and think only of the credit, or “kudos” as they call it, it will bring them. Many eulogistic articles have been written on Freud's psychotherapy of late, but they are absurdly superficial, and I am afraid they will strongly condemn it as soon as they hear of its sexual basis and realise what it means. The most we can hope for is a few practical converts who can work and spread their experience. However we must do what we can and pave the way for the future. Brill and I will of course send you reprints of our articles. I published my Salzburg paper in Prince's journal in August,3 and from the letters I received about it it seems to have found favour. I am very eager to keep our movement strictly scientific, for that will very greatly increase its “respectability” and power of obtaining a hearing. I am going always to dissociate myself from all these quack Xian Science, and Emmanuel Church movements, for it is almost hopeless to convert these religious fanatics on a large scale, and also their pandering to the populace brings anyone associated with them into discredit in scientific circles. I have refused to write for this paper Psycho-Therapy4 (which in itself is a quack word over here