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6 December 1906, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear colleague,
I am sure you will draw your conclusions from this “acceleration of reaction-time”1 and guess that your last letter has given me great pleasure,
which is far from being an auxiliary hypothesis. It did indeed seem to me that you had modified your opinions with the purposive idea of pedagogic effect, and I am very glad to see them as they are, freed from such distortion.
As you know, I suffer all the torments that can afflict an “innovator”; not the least of these is the unavoidable necessity of passing, among my own supporters, as the incorrigibly self-righteous crank or fanatic that in reality I am not. Left alone for so long with my ideas, I have come, understandably enough, to rely more and more on my own decisions. In the last fifteen years I have been increasingly immersed in preoccupations that have become monotonously exclusive. (At present I am devoting ten hours a day to psychotherapy.) This has given me a kind of resistance to being urged to accept opinions that differ from my own. But I have always been aware of my fallibility and I have turned the material over and over in my mind for fear of becoming too settled in my ideas. You yourself once remarked that this flexibility of mine indicated a process of development.2
I can subscribe without reservation to your remarks on therapy.3 I have had the same experience and have been reluctant for the same reasons to say any more in public than that “this method is more fruitful than any other.” I should not even claim that every case of hysteria can be cured by it, let alone all the states that go by that name. Attaching no importance to frequency of cure, I have often treated cases verging on the psychotic or delusional (delusions of reference, fear of blushing, etc.), and in so doing learned at least that the same mechanisms go far beyond the limits of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. It is not possible to explain anything to a hostile public; accordi