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Vienna, October 16, 1895
Dearest Wilhelm,
Fortunately I had mailed the little box as well as the letter before I received your reproachful lines. Nevertheless, you are right; but I could explain everything to your satisfaction. The feverish work of these last weeks, the enticing hopes and disappointments, a few genuine findings — all that against a background of feeling miserable physically and the usual everyday annoyances and difficulties. If on top of all that I send you a few pages of philosophical stammering (not that I think they are successful), I hope to have put you in a conciliatory mood again.
I am still all mixed up. I am almost certain that I have solved the riddles of hysteria and obsessional neurosis with the formulas of infantile sexual shock and sexual pleasure, and I am equally certain that both neuroses are, in general, curable — not just individual symptoms but the neurotic disposition itself. This gives me a kind of faint joy — for having lived some forty years not quite in vain — and yet no genuine satisfaction because the psychological gap in the new knowledge claims my entire interest.
I naturally have not had a moment left for the migraine, but that will still come. I completely gave up smoking again, so as not to have to reproach myself for the bad pulse, and to be rid of the miserable struggle against the craving for the fourth and fifth [cigar]; I prefer struggling right away against the first one. Abstinence probably is not very conducive to psychic contentment either.
Enough about myself now. The result is perhaps still gratifying — that I consider the two neuroses essentially conquered and am looking forward to the struggle with the psychological construction.
The Jacobsen book (N. L.)1 moved me more deeply than anything I have read in the last nine years. I consider the last chapters classic.
I am glad that from your numerous hints I can assume you are really better. — Quickly, some gossip. Robert Breuer,2 my only follower in Vienna, will so