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International Psycho-Analytical Association
5 April 1930
London
Dear Professor,
I would have written earlier to thank you for your very interesting and welcome letter of a month or so ago but for my painful illness. As it is, this will serve as a birthday letter to you, for you know I have the practice of not burdening your budget on the day itself, though I shall certainly think of you when that day comes round. I hope you will receive the expected help from your coming visit to Berlin and that it will be even greater than before.
I have just finished going through the translation of “Das Unbehagen” and enjoyed the book more than ever. Mrs. Riviere found a good deal of difficulty in the second part of it, which therefore is not so fluently done as the first part, but you may be sure that at least the accuracy can be guaranteed.
A propos of the book, the editors of an encyclopaedic work entitled “Sex in Civilization” will no longer be able to write, as they did, of your work: “Despite the magnificent sweep of this entire approach, and the brave adventurousness embodied in its challenge, it has seldom, in a deep sense, risen beyond the pathology of the individual”.1
By the way, are you familiar with Edward Carpenter's “Civilisation, its Cause and Cure”?2 I enclose a couple of quotations on the subject of dreams from a book called “The Terrors of the Night” written by Thomas Nashe in 1594.3
I got this week a very human document from a man who has just emerged from a convict prison in England. It might be entitled “Psycho-Analysis under Difficulties”. One of the other persons was an amateur