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10 October 1910
407 Brunswick Avenue
Toronto
Dear Professor Freud,
I suppose you are by now back in the midst of routine, and hard at work. I sincerely hope that the benefit of your holiday will be an enduring one; the Mediterranean trip must have been most enjoyable.
I can hardly write about my visit to you without using superlatives that I know would be distateful. Let me, however, simply but warmly thank you for your friendliness and for the patience with which you answered all my questions. It was for me an inspiration never to be forgotten.
News here is partly good, and partly bad. We are definitely starting the branch association, and circulars are being sent out to a selected list, signed by Putnam, Hoch, Brill and myself. Hoch has been very cordial in the matter.
Brill tells me his practice is not good just now, and mine is nil. I haven't had a single patient for treatment in the six weeks since I got back, so have been forced to have recourse to patients from the Polyclinic. (One of them, a Zwangsneurotiker, has just given me the following infantile theory. Children were made by two large mysterious figures who moulded and shaped them by means of two fleshy limbs without hands; the material out of which the children were made was neither liquid nor solid, like putty; it dropped from the people into something! Till seven he thought women had a penis and imagined his sister's had been cut off. I suppose he must have been reading your writings, for I had given him no suggestions!! The orthodox world could have no other explanations.). The Government has forbidden our Asylum Bulletin to appear any more, as some of the articles were “not fit for publication, even in medical circles” (my own, of course).1 That beats Germany, doesn't it? There is altogether a great deal of prejudice against me in medical circles since especially the paper I read here last June on the Neuroses.2
Still most things have their bright side, and one result has been that I have been able to im