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21 November 1909, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
At last you have realized how Vienna fare must taste to me now that I have been spoiled by my six weeks' absence. Then I need say no more about it.
Stanley Hall wrote me recently: “I am a very unworthy exponent of your views and of course have too little clinical experience to be an authority in that field; but it seems to me that, whereas hitherto many, if not most pathologists have leaned upon the stock psychologists like Wundt, your own interpretations reverse the situation and make us normal psychologists look to this work in the abnormal or borderline field for our chief light.”1 We are still very far from that in Germany. But coming from the old man such serious, thoughtful compliments are very nice.
Out of sheer gratitude I have already sent him three of the lectures and am working desperately on the last. I am making a few changes and additions, and also putting in a few defensive, or rather, aggressive, remarks. Deuticke wants to publish them in German, but I don't know if Hall would like that, and it troubles me that there is nothing new in them.
I am delighted with your mythological studies. Much of what you write is quite new to me, e.g., the mother-lust, the idea that priests emasculated themselves to punish themselves for it. These things cry out for understanding, and as long as the specialists won't help us, we shall have to do it ourselves.
E.g., the castration complex in myth. Since castration was of course unheard of among the Jews, I can't see the point of the New Testament passage. There is a monograph on the Dactyls by Kaibel: Die idaeischen Daktylen2 (the Cretan Mt. Ida). I shall read it as soon as I have time to breathe. In private I have always thought of Adonis as the penis; the woman's joy when the god she had thought dead rises again is too transparent! And isn't it odd that none of the mythologists, neither the prigs nor the lunatics, has seen the need for an interpretation on differ