Letter from Freud to Fliess, April 27, 1895

Vienna, April 27, 1895

Dearest Wilhelm,

Today the letter I expected from you arrived and made me very happy. In it health, work, and progress can finally be found again. I am of course very curious to hear all the news. I hope you are giving first place to the inertia uteri [uterine insufficiency],1 if for no other reason than for the sake of stupid mankind. I thank you very much for your comments on anxiety.2 The biblical story is striking; I have to look it up and ask a Hebrew scholar about the meaning of the word. Or have you too been one since your youth?

For the rest, the distance and the letter writing are a great misery that cannot be helped at all. Especially if in any case one writes as much as I do and then from time to time becomes acquainted with the horror calami.3 My own condition has taught me this again. Since the last cocainization three circumstances have continued to coincide: (1) I feel well; (2) I am discharging ample amounts of pus; (3) I am feeling very well. Thus I want nothing further to do with a heart condition, only the facilitation through nicotine. Really, I have gone through a good deal and nevertheless still cannot get away now, far less so if the diagnosis is harmless than if it is serious. But I shall come and let you help me.

Scientifically, I am in a bad way; namely, caught up in “The Psychology for Neurologists,” which regularly consumes me totally until, actually overworked, I must break off. I have never before experienced such a high degree of preoccupation. And will anything come of it? I hope so, but it is difficult and slow going.

Cases of neurosis are now very rare; my practice is becoming more intensive, but diminishing in extent. Various odds and ends. I shall send you, for Mendel, a few pages on a sensory disturbance described by Bernhardt, one from which I suffer myself.4 Rubbish, of course, just to keep people busy. Löwenfeld attacked me in one of