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Burghölzli-Zürich, 31 March 1907
Dear Professor Freud,
You will doubtless have drawn your own conclusions from the prolongation of my reaction-time. Up till now I had a strong resistance to writing because until recently the complexes aroused in Vienna were still in an uproar. Only now have things settled down a bit, so that I hope to be able to write you a more or less sensible letter.
The most difficult item, your broadened conception of sexuality, has now been assimilated up to a point and tried out in a number of actual cases. In general I see that you are right. Autoerotism as the essence of Dementia praecox strikes me more and more as a momentous deepening of our knowledge—where indeed will it end? Your criteria of the acute stage may be equally cogent, but any attempt at proof encounters great difficulties, chiefly technical: D. pr. allows us only limited insight into the personality. A given case may look quite different according to whether the “withdrawal of libido” takes place in a complex that is accessible to consciousness or in an unconscious one. The connections between infantilism and autoerotism also become increasingly clear. I now have to rely on my own independent thinking more than I did before, since Prof. Bleuler's resistances are more vigorous than ever. In particular he contests the purposivity of dreams, which amounts to denying the masking effect of the complexes, the real core of dream interpretation. Bleuler has insuperable unconscious resistances to analysing his own dreams and associations. In my frequent discussions with him it has become quite clear to me that the expression “libido” and, in general, all the terms (no doubt justified in themselves) that have been carried over into the broadened conception of sexuality are open to misunderstanding, or at least are not of didactic value. They actually evoke emotional inhibitions which make any kind of teaching impossible. Thus I had to launch forth into a long discussion in order to m