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17 December 1911, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
I am very much impressed by your stationery. Opposition is strengthening the ties between us. Maybe Bleuler will treat us better than before, now that he has become an outsider. That would be in keeping with his ambivalence, i.e. his compulsive character.
I am all in favour of your attacking the libido question and I myself am expecting much light from your efforts. Often, it seems, I can go for a long while without feeling the need to clarify an obscure point, and then one day I am compelled to by the pressure of facts or by the influence of someone else's ideas.
My study of totemism and other work are not going well. I have very little time, and to draw on books and reports is not at all the same as drawing on the richness of one's own experience. Besides, my interest is diminished by the conviction that I am already in possession of the truths I am trying to prove. Such truths, of course, are of no use to anyone else. I can see from the difficulties I encounter in this work that I was not cut out for inductive investigation, that my whole make-up is intuitive, and that in setting out to establish the purely empirical science of ΨA I subjected myself to an extraordinary discipline.
This and all sorts of random influences have quite prevented me from working this week; all I can do is wait for better days.
For the next Jahrbuch—January 1912 (allegedly)—I am planning a short article “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the