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Sunday, December 8, 1895
Dear Wilhelm,
Many thanks for your letter and all the warmth it contains. When I see your handwriting again, those are moments of great joy, which allow me to forget much of my loneliness and privation. Moreover, from the fact as well as the content of the letter I can infer that you yourself are feeling well, which is a condition for my cheerfully accepting what comes to me in this complicated life.
With excellent care the confinement is proceeding completely undisturbed, even cheerfully!
The little one is guzzling Gärtner's whole milk and is said — I scarcely see her — to accommodate satisfactorily to all demands.
The child, we like to think, has brought an increase of my practice, doubling what it usually is. I have trouble keeping up with it, can decline what appears disadvantageous, and am beginning to dictate my fees. I am simply gaining confidence in the diagnosis and treatment of the two neuroses and believe I can see how the city is gradually beginning to realize that something is to be had from me.
Have I already written to you that obsessional ideas invariably are reproaches, while at the root of hysteria there always is conflict (sexual pleasure along with possibly accompanying unpleasure)?1 This is a new way of expressing the clinical solution. Right now I have some beautiful mixed cases of the two neuroses and hope to obtain from them more intimate disclosures on the essential mechanism involved.
I always respect your opinion, even when it concerns my psychological work. It puts me in the mood to take up the matter again in a few months, this time with patient, critical, detailed work. The best you can say about it so far is that it deserves the commendation