You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Vienna, October 31, 1895
Dearest Wilhelm,
Although I am dead tired, I feel obliged to write to you before the month is over. First, to your latest scientific reports which I also welcome as a measure of your headaches.
First impression: amazement that there exists someone who is an even greater fantasist than I am and that he should be none other
than my friend Wilhelm. Conclusion: I intend to return the pages to you so they will not get lost. Meanwhile, I found the matter quite plausible and said to myself that only an expert in all fields like you could have come up with it. I was singularly impressed with the sharp glance1 over all the roofs. I guess I was born to be your claque.
I had better not yet borrow anything against my own million.2 I really do believe that it hangs together, but I still do not trust the individual parts. I continually exchange them for others and do not yet dare to show the structure to a wise man. What you have in hand has also become partially devalued and is rather intended to be a sample, but I hope it will come off. Now I am pretty much drained3 and in any case I must put the matter aside for two months, because I have to write about childhood paralyses for Nothnagel before 1896 — so far not a word of it is on paper.
I have begun to have doubts about the pleasure-pain explanation of hysteria and obsessional neurosis which I announced with so much enthusiasm. The constituent elements are correct beyond question, but I have not yet put the pieces of the puzzle in the right place.
Fortunately for me, all these theories must flow into the clinical estuary of repression, where I have daily opportunities to be corrected or enlightened. My “bashful” case must be finished by the end of '96. He developed hysteria in his youth and later showed delusions of reference. His almost transparent history ought to clear up a few disputed points for me. Another man (who does not dare to go out in the street because of homicidal tendencies) ought to help m