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Burghölzli-Zürich, 12 August 1907
Dear Professor Freud,
Please excuse my long silence. The three weeks of military service left me not a single moment for myself. We were at it from 5 in the morning till 8 in the evening; evenings I was always dog-tired. When I got back home, the chores at the Clinic had piled into mountains and
on top of that Prof. Bleuler and the 1st assistant1 went on holiday. So I have more than enough to keep me busy. Just to make the cup brim over, the secretariat of the Amsterdam Congress began clamouring for my manuscript which did not yet exist. I had to throw myself head over heels into working up my lecture. It's a hard nut! The most difficult feat of all is to leach out the wealth of your ideas, boil down the essence, and finally bring off the master-wizard's trick of producing something homogeneous. To me it seems all but impossible to water the product down so as to make it more or less palatable to the ignorant public. Just now I am working on the latest development of your views—the detailed introduction of sexuality into the psychology of hysteria. Often I want to give up in sheer despair. But in the end I always console myself with the thought that none of this will be understood by 99% of the public anyhow, so that in this part of my lecture I can say pretty much what I want. It won't be understood either way. It is only a demonstration, a confirmation, of the fact that in the year 1907 someone officially said something positive about Freud's theory of hysteria at an International Congress. I am becoming more and more convinced that you are right when you attribute the not wanting to understand only to ill will. One makes all sorts of discoveries in this respect. America is on the move. In the last 3 weeks six Americans, one Russian, one Italian, and one Hungarian have been here. No Germans!
As soon as I have finished my lecture, this child of sorrow, I hope to be able to write you again.
Again apologies for the long pause,
Ever s