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1 January 1930
81 Harley Street, London
Dear Professor,
Thank you very much for the copy of your latest book, with its kind inscription.1
I had read it last week in Mrs. Riviere's proofs and was on the point of writing to you to congrarulate [congratulate] you on it. There is so much that one could say that I hardly know where to begin. Of course I was
delighted with all the part concerning civilisation, and instructed by the more technical part on the theory of guilt. I fully accept what you say about the [specifically]2 close relationship between this and hostility and indeed have been teaching that for some time, though I do not think I have formulated it so sharply in any writing. My only difference with your views still remains my uncertainty about the Todestrieb. My difficulty does not come from either of the two kinds of resistance you indicated. Both psycho-analysis and life have shown me amply the amount of hostility in human nature and I should certainly have stated this to be, as you have done, the essential obstacle to civilisation. Nor does it arise from any preference for the idea of bipolarity in love for I have no special preference for bipolar views in general in comparison with pluralistic ones. I fully agree with your philosophical conclusions on the levelling of energy in the earlier part of the “Jenseits”, but felt that you took a jump when you identified these principles with the clinical observations of aggressivity and death wishes in the psycho-analytical realm. I still do not see why one cannot regard the function of these latter as being to remove the obstacles to pleasure, in which case they would come under the heading of what are called “reactive” instincts. This is the view I tried to represent in my Congress paper.3 At the moment I feel, by the way, that this paper is my best effort and I hope that it may have carried the problem of anxiety a step further, though I am doubtful of your agreement on the point. If you can afford the tim