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22 February 1909
Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear Dr. Jones,
You are performing big work, accept my thanks for it and let me express the hope that the progress of our cause will coincide with your personal advantage. Yet in reading your—as usual—highly characteristic descriptions
of the leading persons in american Psychopathology I could not refrain from doubting your views in one point and regarding one man. You write, Morton Prince is an upright sympathetic man, very much leaning to our theories and you seem to get yourself into a sort of attachment towards him. Now I have been told in Salzburg that he proclaims my views are mostly taken from Janet and in fact identical with them, I know from Brill and the same from Abraham,1 that he declined papers sent him on his demand on the account of their containing too much of sexual matter—you say he is not prudish, but he answered Abraham that he could not accept the term “homosexual” because he has so many lay readers (or ladies may be)—his exposition of my remarks on the Unconscious are only bad misconceptions, which make me surmise he has never read the book but only looked at the special item.2 Now how can you reconcile the words and the deeds of this man, the judgment I must shape of him and the impression he gave you? It might be better to keep from him and to be prepared to his bad intentions veiled by his friendly speaking.
As for your diplomacy I know you are excellently fitted for it and will do it masterly. But I am afraid it is easy to do too much in this way. Consider it is a piece of psychoanalysis you are performing on your countrymen, you are not to say too much at once or at too early a moment, but the resistance cannot be avoided, it must come sooner or later, and it is best to provoke it slowly and designedly.
I am impatient Brill should bring out some of my writings in translation, I will stand the blame for it and if there is true scientific interest independent from the money earning desire in your countr