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15 October 1908,
My dear friend and heir, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
The days we spent so auspiciously together in Zürich have left me in high good humour. Please tell your dear wife that one passage in her letter1 gave me particular pleasure.
I know you are still busy with your military duties and I really ought to leave you in peace, but an observation I made recently leaves me none. Yesterday, one of my patients, the anxiety man, a classic case, now well on his way to being cured, very intelligent, in every way the contrary of Dem. pr., and, incidentally, familiar with all our publications, offered the following idea, which he himself immediately classified as paranoid: I am an officers' corps. Doesn't that sound exactly like the formulas of your woman patient2 which, as recently as Salzburg, you declared to be fundamentally different from those of a hysteria or obsessional neurosis case? Here is the explanation. He failed to become an officer and feels very badly about it; this is his compensation. The meaning is: first, that he is an officer's body, because his father always told him he was unfit for any other profession, and next that he is as handsome as only an officer can be—he was indeed a handsome young fellow and his good looks were his undoing; having been thoroughly spoiled at home, he expected to succeed in the army thanks to his looks alone, nothing could go wrong, he was sure to be everybody's darling, and at first he apparently was;—secondly, he is a “Soldatenmensch”3—an officers' catamite. Immediately