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1003 Seestrasse, Küsnach-Zürich,
17 May 19121
Dear Professor Freud,
Of course I shall be delighted to publish Rosenstein's rejoinder in the Jahrbuch. Kronfeld is an arrogant gasbag who in my view doesn't even deserve refuting. I have written to him personally that I shall not reply to his criticism, since his criticism (as he himself has admitted) turns out to be a joke. He tried to imitate our method and failed. Thereupon he gave up trying and criticized the method (instead of himself). He has admitted to me in a letter that his position is the following: 1. the method is false and leads nowhere; 2. the facts asserted by ΨA do not exist. He denied that he was talking like a Schoolman. We were the Schoolmen because we would not listen to logic.
Rosenstein's reply could appear in Part II of the 1912 volume. The deadline is the end of July.
As regards the question of incest, I am afraid of making a very paradoxical impression on you. I only venture to throw a bold conjecture into the discussion: the large amount of free-floating anxiety in primitive man, which led to the creation of taboo ceremonies in the widest sense (totem, etc.), produced among other things the incest taboo as well (or rather: the mother and father taboo). The incest taboo does not correspond with the specific value of incest sensu strictiori any more than the sacredness of the totem corresponds with its biological value. From this standpoint we must say that incest is forbidden not because it is desired but because the free-floating anxiety regressively reactivates infantile material and turns it into a ceremony of atonement (as though incest had been, or might have been, desired). Psychologically, the incest prohibition doesn't have the significance which