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Vienna, October 8, 1895
Dearest Wilhelm,
By this time news from you had become a necessity for me because I had already drawn the conclusion, in which I am rarely
wrong, that your silence meant headaches. I began to feel more comfortable again when — after a long time — I once more held a piece of your scientific material in my hands. So far I have merely glanced at it and fear that respect for so much honest and subtle material will put my theoretical fantasies to shame.
I am putting together all sorts of things for you today — several debts, which remind me that I also owe you thanks, your case history of labor pains, and two notebooks of mine. Your notes reinforced my first impression that it would be desirable to make them into a full-fledged pamphlet on “The Nose and Female Sexuality.” Naturally, I was disappointed that the concluding remarks with their surprisingly simple explanations were missing.
Now, the two notebooks. I scribbled them full at one stretch since my return, and they will bring little that is new to you. I am retaining a third notebook that deals with the psychopathology of repression, because it pursues its topic only to a certain point. From there on I had to work once again with new drafts and in the process became alternately proud and overjoyed and ashamed and miserable — until now, after an excess of mental torment, I apathetically tell myself: it does not yet, perhaps never will, hang together. What does not yet hang together is not the mechanism — I can be patient about that — but the elucidation of repression, the clinical knowledge of which has in other respects greatly progressed.
Just think: among other things I am on the scent of the following strict precondition for hysteria, namely, that a primary sexual experience (before puberty), accompanied by revulsion and fright, must have taken place; for obsessional neurosis, that it must have happened, accompanied by pleasure.
But I am not succeeding with the mechanical elucidation; rather,