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Küsnach bei Zürich, 30 November 1909 2 December 1909
Dear Professor Freud,
I have to be continually thanking you—this time for the new edition of Psychopathology.1 Your editions follow one another with enviable speed. So quickly that the opposition will have their work
cut out to keep pace. We can also rejoice over the new issue of the Jahrbuch. The prospects are excellent.
I feel more and more that a thorough understanding of the psyche (if possible at all) will only come through history or with its help. Just as an understanding of anatomy and ontogenesis is possible only on the basis of phylogenesis and comparative anatomy. For this reason antiquity now appears to me in a new and significant light. What we now find in the individual psyche—in compressed, stunted, or one-sidedly differentiated form—may be seen spread out in all its fullness in times past. Happy the man who can read these signs! The trouble is that our philology has been as hopelessly inept as our psychology. Each has failed the other.
I have now found out what the Idaean Dactyls are:2 they are the Kabiri or Kuretes. You probably know of the old Kabiric elements in Greek mythology. The Dactyls were a legendary folk inhabiting the Phrygian Ida, discoverers of iron mines and inventors of the blacksmith's art, akin to the Kabiri, but they were also gods, almost always a plurality, very unindividual (Herakles and the Dioscuri descend from them or are related to them). Originally they were “Toby jug” gods (“kanobos”),3 always depicted as pygmies and wearing hoods, i.e., as Invisibles (cf. our dwarfs, goblins, pixies, Tom Thumbs, etc.). An extremely important, profoundly archaic streak in Hellenic mythology! They are direct animators of inert matter (lares and penates in Italy). Not primarily phallic, but elemental. Only the great, that is the epic, gods seem to be phallic.
Did Kaibel's monograph on the Idaean Dactyls appear in book form or in a journal?
For technical reasons I am very interested to hea