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25 June 1922
Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear Jones,
I ca'nt know when this letter will reach you. Yesterday a general strike of the officials broke out which may mean the beginning of the final decomposition or be only a forerunner of it.
I think our friendship has gone through a severe test, and has fairly well stood it. I could say it was a triumph were it not for two of your sayings which strike me as insincere or at least exaggerated. The first was your suspicion that Mrs. Riviere wanted to put herself in your place, the second your humble request that at least “the decision which articles should appear at all” should be reserved to you. It sounds like mockery.
The necessities of a “secondary analysis” put me into the unwished for position to criticize and analyse yourself, a task highly undesirable with a friend of whose value you feel sure and whose frailties you are accustomed to forbear. Now what made the case so hard for me was the fact that accuracy and plainness is not in the character of your dealings with people. Slight distortions and evasions, lapses of memory, twisted denials, a certain predilection for sidetracks prevail and whenever I had to examine a case between you and her in detail I had to find, that you were to be doubted while that implacable woman overemphasising the importance of the slightest features yet was right and could not be refuted.
To some more serious errors in handling her you had confessed yourself and so you may guess how fearfully constrained my position was. I hope I have succeeded with you but I cannot say I have much altered the other party. It lasted months before I began to understand the conditions of her case. I am still struggling to find out the technical ways of character-analysis now the time has passed and I dont think I could impress her in a noticeable degree. She intends to come back for a month in Oct.. I fear she will require special care and regards indefinitely. If she had not those inhibitions, analysis would