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.
1003 Seestrasse, Küsnach-Zürich, 29 November 1910
Dear Professor Freud,
I had a faint suspicion that your present attitude to the divergent tendencies of Stekel and Adler is not exactly a simple one. There is in any case a noticeable analogy between Adler and Bleuler: the same mania to make the terminology as different as possible and to squeeze the flexible and fruitful psychological approach into the crude schematism of a physiological and biological straitjacket. Bleuler is another one who fights against shrivelling in your shadow. Last Sunday, at the Meeting of Swiss Psychiatrists in Bern,1 he spoke about ambivalence, i.e., pairs of opposites. It was dreadfully superficial and schematic. It looks as though biology were taking all the spirit out of psychology.
Now for Bleuler's letter! Another masterpiece of tortuosity and “diplomatic vagueness.” It is quite evident that his ratiocinative faculties have gone bankrupt. He was unable to advance a single reason when talking with me. There is no doubt at all that it is not you or the statutes or Stekel or anything else that is the cause of his negativism but simply and solely myself, ostensibly because of the Isserlin affair. But this is merely a pretext. The real and only reason is my defection from the abstinence crowd. After I had broken down his cover-resistances through the last dream-analysis, the following dreams came out at the party, accompanied by venomous asides (he told them to me in front of the company, all unsuspecting—as if to prove how little he understands dream-analysis!): He was the guest of the German Kaiser, who looked like a fat grocer, sodden with drink. In a second dream he was summoned to Berlin in order to analyse the Kaiser. But he didn't get round to that, for the Kaiser locked him in the cellar. Bleuler would like more than anything to pick a quarrel with me about the reasons for my defection. He won't do that for the sake of discretion, instead he refuses to join our crowd. However, i