Letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, February 23, 1921

The International Psycho-Analytical Press

23 February 1921
London

Dear Professor,

Many thanks for your letters of Feb. 7th and 18th. Let me answer the latter first. The true explanation is much simpler. The probability is that you have mis-read a note from Lissa & Kann (corresponding to one from them to me dated Feb. 15th) in which fl. means florins, which can be mistaken for F. I., the beginning of a thousand florins. If you compare their letter L with their figure I you will see the difference. They have made no mistake, at least in their acknowledgement of my instructions, and the correct sum was sent to Lippmann & Rosenthal, as shown by their acknowledgement to me. But I will write to Lissa & Kann, as you request, and make sure that your total is confirmed. You are right on one point, that I did not deduct my dividend of Fl. 75. In fact I never knew, till your letter came this morning, that I possessed it. I had written to ask them if a dividend was due, but they never answered, in their usual careless way. I will have this transferred when I write. The interest I did not deduct, as the smallness of the sum is not worth the complexity of the calculation.

I hope you will get Strachey to carry out the plan of translating the papers you mention. It will be very good to have them at last in English. His translation of the Beaten Child, which I am just going through, is very fair (he ranks next to Miss Hubback and Mrs. Riviere as a translator), though it needs a good deal of correction, both as regards German and English. By the way, there is a passage (S. 158, Z. 13 v.u.) about which I should like to make sure: “darf es aber als Beweis etc.”.1 From the context I can only think this means that the observed facts of genital excitement are a proof of the existence of the child's dim notion of normal adult sexual goals, but my wife says that grammatically the meaning Strachey has