Letter from Freud to Fliess, July 14, 1894

July 14, 1894

Dearest friend,

Your praise is nectar and ambrosia for me, because I know full well how difficult it is for you to bestow it — no, more correctly, how seriously you mean it when you do bestow it. Since then, preoccupied with abstinence, I have produced very little; another description of anxiety neurosis, which I have just given to Breuer. Miss Elisabeth von R. became engaged in the meantime.

My condition — I now feel obliged not to arouse the suspicion that I might want to hold something back — is as follows: since your letter of Thursday a fortnight ago, abstinence, which lasted eight days; on the following Thursday, in an indescribably bleak moment, one cigar; then again eight days abstinence; the following Thursday one more, since then peace. In brief, a pattern has established itself — one cigar a week to commemorate your letter, which once again robbed me of my enjoyment of tobacco. In practice, this may not be all that different from abstinence.

Since then I have spoken to Oser,1 who claims to have gone through the same angina nicotina and who spoke with great enthusiasm about the long duration of the condition. Well, that is the second Jew who declares it to be an eel; well, then, it will be an eel?2

Condition unchanged. At the end of last week I again had to resort to digitalis; the pulse was again delirious and the asystolic sensation just terrible. With digitalis I am better, but not really comfortable. Should I take digitalis frequently or rarely? I promise to obey.

That I shall visit you both in August is a certainty for me, beyond all obstacles. I am waiting only for the “where.”

The day before yesterday an old gentleman3 asked me in a restaurant, Do you know whether my son-in-law will come to the scientific meeting in Vienna in September? I did not know anything about it. My plans are to go with my wife to Abbazia or Dalmatia before the meeting.

Your headaches leave me hurt and helpless. I would not wait until