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14 April 1908, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
This letter will be waiting for you when you get home. I am sorry to hear that you have been unwell and that you have been obliged to take a short holiday rather than a long one. With your youthful stamina you ought to make short shrift of any illness.
Three of your papers are lying on my desk. The first, the one you did in collaboration with Bleuler,1 displeases me with its hesitations and concern over the good opinion of E. Meyer;2 you have forbidden me to speak of the second, your long-awaited Amsterdam report;3 the third, which is the third number of my Papers on Applied Psychology,4 is a pure delight with its resoluteness and clarity and, as befits such clear thinking, the language is enchantingly warm and beautiful. How boldly you here proclaim the psychic aetiology of psychic disorders, from which you shrank back in the other papers. In this one, to be sure, you were free to express your own opinion, you were speaking only to laymen and ladies; in the others you were hampered by a spirit of compromise and by concern over the prejudices of physicians and the incomprehension of our colleagues!
Oddly enough, I have been reading in your Amsterdam paper that child hysteria does not enter this context,5 whereas I myself have been toying with the idea of working up my analysis of a hysterical phobia in a five-year-old boy6 for the Congress. But I doubt if this plan will be carried out.
I am well, but I have worked so hard these last few weeks that I am quite at my wits' end. I shall need half a day of solitude before plunging