British Psycho-Analytical Society

17 February 1925
London

Dear Professor,

Thank you very much for your kind letter. Your explanation about the “Alptraum” was very interesting and it awakened a chord in my memory. I recollect that the criticism you passed on the book to me at the time was that it was the sort of work which did not greatly interest you because it was too much a question of simply making translations from the unconscious.1 I remembering thinking at the time that, though the criticism was doubtless justified, it would have been more apposite if it had been confined to the first couple of chapters. These, for certain reasons, had to be purely interpretative, but the main point of the book which came out later had, I hoped, contained work of a somewhat different kind. My theme was