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Vienna, November 29, 1895
Dear Wilhelm,
Impossible to let you wait until the child has made up its mind. Evidently it is insisting on the very day to which, by some kind of reckoning, it can lay a claim. Martha is doing splendidly just now. I hope to hear something similar from you, that is to say, about your wife and Paulinchen, as she is called incognito.
I feel really amazingly well, as I have not since the beginning of the whole business. Moreover, I no longer have any pus, just a lot of mucous secretion. I have, by the way, never doubted the success of your minor surgical interventions, and thus have earned my well-being. I am in top working form, have nine to eleven hours of hard work, six to eight analytic cases a day — the most beautiful things, of course; all sorts of new material. I am entirely lost to science; when I sit down at my desk at 11 P.M., I must paste and patch up the infantile paralyses. I hope to finish them in two months and then be able further to utilize the impressions gained in the course of treatments.
I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched the psychology; cannot conceive how I could have inflicted it on you. I believe you are still too polite; to me it appears to have been a kind of madness. The clinical solution of the two neuroses probably will stand up, after some modification.
The children have all come down with colds — an epidemic in the house. Minna came a few days ago for a stay of several months' duration. Of the world I see nothing and hear little. Unfortunately, it is precisely at such times, when I find writing so difficult, that I become acutely aware of the distance between Vienna and Berlin.
In view of your last letters I believe in the improvement of your head[aches] and ask you for further confirmation. Wernicke's pupils, Sachs and C. S. Freund, have produced a piece of nonsense on hysteria (on psychic paralyses), which, by the way, is almost a plagiarism of my “Considérations, etc.” in the Archives de ne