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1003 Seestrasse, Küsnach-Zürich,
Dear Professor Freud, 14 February 1911
First of all I am very glad to hear you are well again. Couldn't anyone smell the gas? From a very discreet source a little of your son's “complex” story has come to my ears. Is Martin his mother's favourite? I am sure you know the rest as well as I do.
I am thinking of having all Adler's publications reviewed in extenso and discussed in Zürich. Putnam is a real brick. Even before your
letter arrived I had written him that in agreement with you I would advance the date of the Congress so that he might leave Genoa on September 28th. He will meet you in Zürich at my place; you could then give the seminar instead of me, for Putnam personally, of course. He will be here for 2-3 weeks, working. An amazing man, a natural aristocrat.
Yes, I do have some wishes in regard to the third edition of your Interpretation of Dreams: I have criticized Morton Prince's “Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams” very sharply and in detail,1 and have also drilled my seminar students in the most rigorous Freudian usage. Now, I have noticed that my students (and I myself) take exception to the following passages: p. 92 (2nd edn.) “The dreams of young children … quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults.”2 This sentence is objectionable in terms of Freudian dream interpretation; likewise p. 94: “though we think highly of the happiness of childhood,”3 etc., objectionable in terms of the Freudian sexual theory. The children's dreams on pp. 92 and 93 seem to me insufficiently interpreted; the interpretation uncovers only a superficial layer of the dream, but not the whole, which in both cases is clearly a sexual problem whose instinctual energy alone explains the dynamism of the dreams. But you may have reasons (didactic?) for not revealing the deeper layer of interpretation, just as in the preceding dreams (your own). I also miss a specific reference to the fact that the essential (personal) meaning of the