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Vienna, November 27,1 1893
Dear friend,2
The last letter I was able to produce for you immediately thereafter was lost,3 as we say in Vienna, and then came a period in which I did not feel like writing, my nose was stopped up, and I could not get myself to do it. I again let myself be cauterized, again enjoy working, but otherwise am little satisfied with the success of the local therapy. I am not obeying your order not to smoke; do you really consider it a remarkable boon to live a great many years in misery? But I am very little bothered by the corresponding sensations.
So now it turns out that I have put the news about my own worthy person into the very foreground, as though there were nothing more important to write or ask about. The lost letter contained a lot pertaining to science: nose, sexualia, migraine with scotoma; all this is lost now, but it is nothing to cry about. You could not use the nose stories in any event — guesses4 without nose mirror findings. The sexual business is becoming more firmly consolidated, the contradictions are fading away, but new material is very meager because of a quite unusual lack of patients during office hours. When I take a case for thorough repair, everything is confirmed and sometimes the seeker finds more than he wishes5 — especially anesthesia sexualis has many and quite contrary meanings. The anxiety type as seen in Pietsch6 has become quite clear. I have seen a jolly old bachelor who denies himself nothing and who produced a classic anxiety attack after he let himself be seduced by his thirty-year-old mistress into having intercourse three times in a row. Altogether I have hit upon the idea to tie anxiety not to a psychic but rather to a physical consequence of sexual abuse. I was led to this by a wonderfully pure case of anxiety neurosis following coitus interruptus in a totally placid and totally frigid woman. Otherwise it does not make any sense.
In every other respect the period of my silence has been quite uninteres