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9 January 1914
69 Portland Court, London
Dear Professor Freud,
Abraham tells me that Jung has enquired about the place of the next congress, and I wonder if this is not the best moment to suggest a dissolution of the association. If Berlin, Budapest and Vienna (London is not yet an official group, and we have not heard from Jung) combine in this
request, Jung may simply get defiant and hold the congress willy-nilly, hoping we will stay away from it. That would leave him in full possession of the field, which would never do at all. Don't you think that you personally could write to him proposing either a dissolution or at least a postponement of the congress for this year, there being no one else with any authority or moral right approaching yours? Then the matter might be submitted to a referendum of all the groups, with individual voting, and this would give us a good chance of winning, for many undecided men, like Eder, would vote for this rather than have the painful farce of last September repeated.
Thank you very much for your encouraging letter that came this week. I am hard at work studying the various problems in question, and have some highly interesting material. One case has made me realise more clearly than before the significance of the castration-complex in women, and its relation to the horror of blood and the humiliation at menstruation (awakening of infantile ideas of being deprived of the penis). It makes me think that much of the curious horror of menstruation shewn in folk-lore may be due to this complex in men, a typical example being the isolation of menstruating women for fear their presence may induce impotence (symbolically, e.g. turn the milk sour, etc.).
I have been chosen as co-referent with McDougall of Oxford for a discussion on the Sexualtheorie at a conjoint meeting of the British Psychological Society and the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, March 10th,1 also at a discussion of ψα at the British Medical Associati