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[Barracks, St. Gallen],1
4 October 1911
Dear Professor Freud,
At last I can settle down to write to you. I have now been in barracks for a week doing my duty as a medical jack-of-all-trades, anointing feet, cutting out corns, treating diarrhoea, and am beginning to feel squat and ugly again. Luckily I have some time for myself, so I am not entirely pulverized by the constant spectacle of odious corporeality. Besides, something can be gained even from its most indelicate aspect, to wit, from what is known as the “short-arm inspection.”1a At this phallic parade of 500 soldiers 14% had phimosis. Here we have the biological incentive to circumcision. The commonest abnormality seems to be a tendency to hypospadias.2 It looks positively female.
It was all very turbulent at home after Weimar, and the first days of duty were equally hectic. Also I have a foul cold at the moment. However, I am doing everything I can to push on with the printing of the second half of the Jahrbuch. Right now I am working on Silberer. The printing started a month ago. Please send the manuscript3 you were unable to give me in Weimar direct to Deuticke.
The Congress in Munich4 must have been a frightfully stupid affair. I have heard reports of it from various quarters. Frank perpetrated the following pronouncement: “It is enormously important in ΨA that not only the lady patient should repose comfortably on the couch but the doctor as well.” Jones and Seif stood up for us. With what result I don't know.
Do you know anything about the outcome of the negotiations between Stekel and Bergmann?
For our interpretation of the Utnapishtim episode in Gilgamesh I have found some rather weird parallels which shed light on Utnapishtim's