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25 February 1908, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
What you write about your chief sounds reassuring. I shall admire the phenomenon as it deserves; it is indeed a rare virtue, of which I myself do not feel capable.
Your judgment of the hysteria formulas and even more so your other observations about my work have given me a rarely experienced satisfaction. I know that what you say is true, that my manner of working is indeed honest, which is why my knowledge is so fragmentary and why I am usually incapable of handling a presentation of any length. I have suppressed my habit of conscious speculation as radically as possible and have absolutely forsworn the temptation to “fill in the gaps in the universe.”1 But except for you, who believes me?
The appearance of this piece in the new Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft can be laid to a bit of skullduggery on the part of the editors. They originally solicited the piece for the Jahrbuch für sexuelle