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17 March 1911
407 Brunswick Avenue
Toronto
Dear Professor Freud,
Thank you greatly for your very delightful and welcome letter. It is excellent to get good personal news of yourself and your son.
I am afraid I cannot write a bright letter, for, as you will surmise from the one I wrote about ten days ago, things are with me very depressing. Fortunately an end is in sight for I have had to come to a definite decision. My wife said she could not stand the anxiety and suspense of the situation here, and that if I stayed on she would leave me for good. There was also reason to think that that would soon mean suicide, though she did not say so. She is very pessimistic, and suffers greatly from complicated abdominal trouble (kidney stone, etc.). I decided to accompany her, and our plan at present is as follows: I go to Europe in September and if I get my Professorship before I go, I will come back for one session only to lecture and then leave; if I do not get it I shan't come back. In the meantime I will try to get a position in the States. If I do not get one to my liking I will go to England. In any case I shall find a way to go on with the work.
I have not been able to do any work in the past two months or more, but I now feel I can settle down to it again.
A point of some little interest was the discovery this week of the following infantile theory, one no doubt familiar to you: the child grows inside and emerges per rectum; the material is food, and the fertilising fluid is medicine supplied by the doctor. In a birth dream, she called on the way to “bathe” in a milk shop, and was given several bottles of milk, [with]1 one of which was a violet colour bottle. The associations to the latter were: (1) violet = favourite flower—buds—children. (2) “poisonous” medicines are in blue bottles (3) butter-milk (semen symbol) is sold in brown bottles (brown + blue = violet). She has to take buttermilk as medicine, and it makes her feel sick.
It is rather pretty, don't you think so.