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International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
7 May 1920
London
Dear Professor,
The circumstances that my secretarial wife is in bed after a nasal operation (progressing well) and my fingers are stiff with rheumatism account for my using the typewriter. I write just today at the request of Mr. James Strachey to ask if there is any hope of your taking him for analysis. He would prefer to start now rather than October if you have a vacancy. He is a man of 30, well educated and of a well-known literary family (I hope he may assist with translation of your works), I think a good fellow but weak and perhaps lacking in tenacity. He tells me he can spend £300 on fees, so doubts if he ought to pay two guineas a treatment if it were possible to pay less and go on for longer.
I am afraid I bore you with my affaire Forsyth. I will try to take your advice and leave him alone, if only he will do the same. I am now feeling distinctly hostile to him for his very scurvy behaviour.
Thank you for the permission to translate your technique papers. Of course I will attend to them myself, you may be sure. The other ones can come later; Flugel is at present reviewing them seriatim for our society.
I have entrusted some excellent Havanas to two separate messengers going to Vienna, and hope they will get through safely.
As you mention the question of gratitude I may as well make my own view of it clear also. To me it is clear that I owe my career, my livelihood, my position, and my capacity of happiness in marriage—in short everything—to you and the work you have done. Besides those outstanding facts all the small services I may be able to render must always weigh light in the balance, and I cannot hope to redress it. But gratitude is an emotion I can endure well, which as you know is not always the case.
I had a talk with Trotter last night. He was willing to accept the idea of the primordial beginnings of the herd instinct being called sexual, probably because they are so unlike such crude phenomen