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Vienna, January 22, 1898
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear Wilhelm,
Mela is doing very well; she is in good spirits, looks radiant, which on the fourth day after the laparotomy is not a trifle, and seems to be past all worry. You know that I have always had some liking for her, I believe ever since in your honor she played the old damsel who was amazed at the reflex new-roses.1 Oscar, too, is gradually recovering; he was torn apart;2 the two nights before the operation apparently were pretty bad because of the excitement. There is very little sense in fate's trying our friend Oscar so severely; he will become ossified quite prematurely. That will be all.
Well, my good spirits ended with a bad migraine on Thursday. Keep the two issues of the DR; I do not know how long it will take for a new one to materialize. Everything has vanished. This nasty habit of my [mental] organization suddenly to rob me of all my mental resources is for me the hardest thing in life to bear. The button business, which has received my fullest recognition, stands out like an oasis in the desert. In the carriage I already convinced myself, by unbuttoning my clothes, that you were right.3 My practice is not conducive to further testing [of your bilaterality theory]. Recently I had a total of two patients in three consulting hours! Altogether, this is an abominably bad year.
Ida's remarks about John the Baptist seem to me to be not only clever but also correct. But is the rejection she bases on this fair? Does she not thereby yield too much to her instinctive aversion to everything that is neurotic? John no doubt has les vertus de ses défauts [the virtues of his defects] and the reverse; psychoneurosis will no doubt turn out to be in general the reverse of the great psychic achievements of concentration. Christ himself no doubt was a virginal, abstinent visionary. It is noteworthy that obsessional ideas and phobias (as remorse for old sins) are invariably unsociable; it is only abstinence that attracts people,