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30 June 1909, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
It is high time I wrote you again. Yours would have reconciled me to greater misdeeds on your part; perhaps I am already too biased in your favour. Immediately after receiving your letter I wrote Fräulein Sp. a few amiable lines, giving her satisfaction, and today received an answer from her. Amazingly awkward—is she a foreigner by any chance?—or very inhibited, hard to read and hard to understand. All I can gather from it is that the matter means a great deal to her and that she is very much in earnest. Don't find fault with yourself for drawing me into it; it was not your doing but hers. And the matter has ended in a manner satisfactory to all. You have been oscillating, as I see, between the extremes of Bleuler and Gross. When I think that I owe your ultimate conversion and profound conviction to the same experience with Gross, I cannot possibly be angry and can only marvel at the profound coherence of all things in this world.
Now to myself. My energy is pretty well exhausted, except for one undertaking. In a fortnight I shall be going to Munich and from there to Ammerwald (address follows). This one undertaking is my paper about the Rat Man. I am finding it very difficult; it is almost beyond my powers of presentation; the paper will probably be intelligible to no one outside our immediate circle. How bungled our reproductions are, how wretchedly we dissect the great art works of psychic nature! Unfortunately this paper in turn is becoming too bulky. It just pours out of me, and even so it's inadequate, incomplete and therefore untrue. A wretched business. I am determined to finish it before leaving and to do nothing more before setting sail for our America. I'm too tired this year.
Oh yes, I mustn't forget to announce the arrival of Dr. Karpas1 and to recommend him to you, he's a good boy,2 a student of Brill. He wants to go to Zürich in mid-July and stay a few months. He has attended a number of our Wednesd