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Burghölzli-Zürich, 17 April 1907
Dear Professor Freud,
Many thanks for your news! Unfortunately I must tell you at once that we have no room at all in the Clinic at present, which is most regrettable. We are once again in a period of fearful overcrowding. At the same time I would like to remind you that our in-patient department, being a State institution, is not prodigally luxurious and caters
only for the general public. The board for foreigners amounts only to 10-12 fr. a day at the maximum. The charge for a private attendant is a little more than 2 fr. a day. Cheap and middling to good, therefore. As I said we are inundated at present, so it is quite impossible for us to take your patient. I hope, however, that this will not set a precedent, for I would dearly like to investigate a case with which you too are thoroughly acquainted. It may be that in a few weeks we shall have enough room again.
I can understand how repugnant it must be for you to get into cock rights, for that is exactly how the public looks at it and satisfies its sublimated blood lust. Since I am not so deeply committed and am not defending my own brain-children, it sometimes tickles me to venture into the arena. The identification with you will later prove to be very flattering; now it is honor cum onere.
Your case is most interesting. The attacks look more hysteriform than catatonic. The voices are highly suspicious, indicating a very deep split and a brittleness of the niveau mental. I have often had cases that passed with apparent smoothness from hysteria or obsessional neurosis straight into D. pr. But I don't know what to make of them. Were they already D. pr., but unbeknownst to us? We still know far too little, in fact nothing, about the innermost nature of D. pr., so it may well fare with us as it did with the old doctors who assumed that croupous pneumonia occasionally passed over into TB. We only see how at a certain period in the development of various interrelated complexes the ra