Letter from Freud to Fliess, June 4, 1896

June 4, 1896

Dear Wilhelm,

Well! We are to meet this month, and in Berlin at that? What a temptation. Nevertheless, I must resist it. In June I still would lose such and such an amount per day from four patients who can no longer come in July. The head of the household who completely uses up his laboriously earned sixteen to seventeen thousand thus cannot permit himself to do this. Further, against Berlin: did you forget that our congresses should take place neither in Vienna nor in Berlin, because in those two places we are workers who cannot take time off? What I lose by excluding Berlin I shall make up for myself next time, by calling for you at your house, kissing Ida's hand and R.W.'s forehead, and then traveling with you some two to four hours possibly to a place on the Baltic. At the moment it is unfortunately not possible for Martha to come along to neutralize and satisfy your wife. Martha is going with the children to Aussee tomorrow and is without help.

I gather from the gap in your letters that you must have a rather bad period behind you, but how many things you must have found and guessed at! I am thoroughly looking forward to them. You will be disappointed in me. These times have brought me, intellectually and morally, to the very point of losing my strength, and now I have had to put neuroses and the ψ aside in order to write about infantile paralyses, which must be finished by the end of August. Since my last letter I have become convinced only of the last explanation — hysteria up to 4 years; the absence of translating word representations also is valid only for this period of life. The Löwenfeld affair is as follows: you must have read his paper. My remark on “coitus periodicity” is part of my reply (pp.  9-10). Don't trouble yourself too much with it.

I think, then, that I shall tear myself away in July. If you are against the seashore, then some other town: Magdeburg, Danzig. I really need it, often do not recognize myself — that is how much the exper