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14 October 1913
69 Portland Court, London
Dear Professor Freud,
Well, I am definitely installed at last in my new residence, and the first letter written there is appropriately dedicated to you. I hope that before long it will prove to be a centre from which much ψα activity will radiate. The flat itself looks charming; I am very pleased indeed with it, and am already looking forward to entertaining you here sometime as my guest. You will, I think, be pleased to find how well organised it is for work. Loe has been very generous in fitting the flat up, and has been—even for her—extraordinarily efficient.
Many thanks for the Dritte Folge,1 which I notice is larger than its predecessors. It is a comfort to see those articles rescued from the Jahrbuch and Zentralblatt, so that they may be read apart from the influence of a contaminating environment. In a short time our literature, supported by the Zeitschrift, Schriften and Imago, will be quite purified and distinct from the wish-wash that unhappily surrounds it, and it will be our chief care to keep it so.
I have no general news to send this time. Our first meeting will be on the 30th, instead of the 23rd, so as to suit Bryan of Leicester. Sachs tells me that at the first Vienna meeting you gave a report of the Munich Congress.2 How I should have liked to hear it! No doubt you did full justice to Maeder and Seif, not to mention the new star, Schmidt.3
I am completely engrossed these days in the emotional task of arranging, or destroying, masses of old letters, documents, etc.. It is painful work, for it unrolls in a pitiless way the story of my past life, which is far from being altogether agreeable. It is a story of much turmoil and turbulence; an unhappy childhood followed by ten years of uninterrupted success, then a series of foolishness and failures, and now gradually settling down to a more substantial basis where, shorn of my illusions, I trust it will enable me to do something sufficiently worth while to justify m