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1003 Seestrasse, Küsnach-Zürich,
8 May 1911
Dear Professor Freud,
It is bad of me to have kept you waiting again so long. The reason is that I came down last week with an atrocious attack of influenza, caught from my children, so that I could do only the most urgent work with a fearful effort. I hadn't the strength for anything else. Today I am sufficiently recovered to give you at least a sign of life.
First I must tell you about Stuttgart. It wasn't all that important. Still, it was interesting to observe how psychiatry is beginning to cast sidelong glances at causation—the physical side, of course. Bonhoeffer1 (Dresden) reported on psychogenic disturbances. Naturally he didn't say a word about ΨA, but in an unguarded moment he dropped a remark about wish-fulfilment, and in conversation afterwards I took the greatest pleasure in rubbing his nose in it. Kraepelin's lecture was utterly sterile and dull and antiquated. His appearance is incredibly plebian. In the evening he gave a very waggish address which started off with “complexes,” etc. He toasted the speakers, with the exception of himself, of course, for which he deserves the diagnosis “autoerotic megalomania.” I almost called out “Hear, hear.” I mention as a curiosity a privatdocent of psychiatry from Giessen who has never set eyes on anything from the Freudian school. All unsuspecting he fell into my hands, and this provided some fun for a couple of hours. I was no longer annoyed by anything but simply had to laugh an awful lot. I was in good company—Seif, Binswanger, Stockmayer.
The New York group has now come into being, and Seif has successfully founded one in Munich. Pleasant news!
My Australian article is finished too. It's about “The Doctrine of Complexes,”2 a stupid thing you had better not see.
It will interest you to hear that Stockmayer is taking up a post in Binswanger's sanatorium. I think I have already told you that Frau Prof. I——is coming to me for treatment.
As to my intellectual activities, I a