Letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, January 2, 1910

2 January 1910
407 Brunswick Avenue
Toronto

Dear Professor Freud,

First let me thank you for the interesting reprint that arrived this week. Like all your writings it opens the way to all sorts of new problems, but it leaves one with the regret that it was so short. What a store of knowledge you have to give us.

The Boston expedition was I am glad to say eminently satisfactory. The paper on dreams aroused general interest, and Stanley Hall asked me to publish it in an extended form in the April number of the American Journal of Psychology.1 In the discussion Putnam unreservedly expressed his agreement with all your views, as he does in two articles in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology,2 the first of which has already appeared. No doubt he has sent you a reprint. Hall spoke but did not say he agreed with your views, confining himself to generalities such as the fact that it was no longer possible for psychologists to ignore your work, that the investigation of it had become urgent, etc.. The part of my paper that aroused most opposition was, curiously enough, my statement that the Traum-gedanke[n] were always egocentric.3 One wild female flourished two dreams at me that were “entirely altruistic”, and declared there was nothing selfish in her, even in her subconscious. Another one said you had no right to generalise that all dreams were egocentric because you hadn't analysed all dreams; it wasn't scientific. What was true of Austrians might not be true of Americans! I said that experience had shown that a man died if he was immersed in deep water for ten minutes. Was one not justified in generalising this statement before proving it on all men and in all seas? Another psychologist said he had been using your psycho-analysis in the study of the aesthetics of humour and found that the results of the analysis depended on the temperature of the room. As you have shamefully