You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
2 February 1910, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
Although experience has taught me to harden myself against the anticipation of your letters, the one that came yesterday gave me great pleasure and even consoled me with its varied contents. Living so far apart, we are bound to have experience of all sorts that we cannot share. You are living on the high seas, while I often can't help
thinking of our little Dalmatian islands where a ship puts in every second Monday.
Ferenczi was a balm to me last Sunday; at last a chance to talk about the things closest to my heart; there is another man I am really sure of. Binswanger had taken up my two previous Sundays, he is a good sort, correct and even intelligent, but he lacks the bit of afflatus I need to lift me up, and his wife, or rather their relationship, is not an unmingled pleasure.
I should have thought it quite impossible to analyse one's own wife. Little Hans's father has proved to me that it can be done. In such analysis, however, it seems just too difficult to observe the technical rule whose importance I have lately begun to suspect: “surmount counter-transference.”
I trust you will bring Honegger to Nuremberg with you, he has made a splendid impression on me too by an attempt to analyse me.1 Perhaps he will bring us Stekel's sensitivity in the interpretation of the unconscious without Stekel's brutality and uncritical approach.
Your deepened view of symbolism has all my sympathy. Perhaps you remember how dissatisfied I was when in agreement with Bleuler all you had to say of symbolism was that it was a kind of “unclear thinking.” True, what you write about it now is only a hint, but in a direction where I too am searching, namely, archaic regression, which I hope to master through mythology and the development of language. It would be wonderful if you could do a piece on the subject for the Jahrbuch.
I have no intention whatever of contributing my paper on general method to the Jahrbuch; it can only benefit