Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, January 15, 1919

15 January 1919
Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19

Dear Jones,

I concede all your predictions about the war and its consequences have come true, but I would be sorry if we could not meet before June this year. A new impulse has been given to ψα activity by the generous gift of one Dr. Anton Freund (Bpest),1 Rank has been promoted to the dignity and function of leader to an “Internat. ψα Verlag”, busy to bring forward books and our periodicals, and in your present state of depression it might do you good to take your part in this new enterprise by editing the english translations of the Zeitschrift as you proposed yourself in one of your letters.

I had no news from America these two years and I feel the loss of dear old Putnam grieviously. He was a pillar of ΨA in his country and behaved most truly and gallantly against me in opposition to the whimsical, unreliable G. Stanley Hall. I had no notion what had become of the movement there yonder the pond whether ΨA had not been dethroned by Adlerism or some other invention, so I earned some consolation from your favourable report.

These last months are growing the worst we had to endure while this war lasted. My eldest son is still a prisoner in Italy (Abruzzi),2 his last news containing good reports but dating from the 30th of November. We are all of us slowly failing in health and bulk, not alone so in this town I assure you. Prospects are dark. I am ready to confess, that fate has not shown injustice and that a german victory might have proved a harder blow to the interests of mankind in general. But it is no relief to have his sympathy placed on the winning side if one's wellbeing is staked on the losing one.

We are eager to get your own publications during these years or books and papers, translations, which have appeared in America. I even fostered a childish expectation, one of the members of the American commission