Draft C. Something of a Report on Motives1

Dearest friend,

I need only intimate the great pleasure it gives me to be able to continue our Easter discussion. On the whole I am not sufficiently unbiased to be a real critic of your work. Therefore, only one thing: I like it very much and do not believe that the congress will bring anything of higher importance. But others should tell you all the nice things this lecture deserves. I turn now to comments and suggestions for changes, in compliance with your own wish.

It must have been written on a day that was not entirely free of headaches, because it does not have the precision and succinctness with which you can write. Some items are decidedly too long, for instance, the formes frustes. I have marked in blue pencil what should go to the barber's. I have tried to bring out more sharply some of the underlying points.

I would recommend to you a comparison with Ménière's disease and hope that the nasal reflex neurosis will soon be generally known as Fliess's disease.

Now to the sexual question. I believe that in this respect one can act more like a literary businessman. The way you present sexual etiology, you are attributing to the audience a knowledge which it, after all, possesses only in latent form. It knows, and yet behaves as though it knew nothing. Preyer,2 whose contribution I fully recognize, really has no claim to be given such prominence in a fleeting reference of this sort. So far as I know his works — because actually I treat the literature the way you do — he falls short on two principal points: (1) he divides neurasthenia into separate, reflexively transmitted afflictions of the stomach, intestines, bladder, and so forth; that is, he does not know our etiological formula, nor does he know that in addition to their direct effect, the sexual noxae also have a predisposing one which constitutes the latent neurasthenia. (2) He derives the reflex neuroses from minor anatomical changes of the genitals instead of from changes in the nervous system. Nevertheles