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Vienna, April 27, 1898
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear Wilhelm,
It was awkward of me to want to wait until the affair with Paschkis was settled. It is settled now by my having severed my affiliation with the klinische Rundschau and having withdrawn my
name from the contributors listed on its cover.1 I intentionally did not send you the review in question. I believe we can now drop this matter.
Your siren's song founders on my plugged ears and tied hands. At present my earnings are so bad that I must not stay away a single day except holidays. It strikes me as funny that I am so dutiful and parsimonious. It must be a sign of old age.
But we must see each other at Whitsun. The refreshing effect of the Easter trip, which was only partially successful in helping me to recover, quickly evaporated. I am very well, but feel dull and now am facing a piece of work, to which I had been looking forward very much, as if I were standing in front of a wall. Do you want me to send you the finished chapter on the dream material? It is to be regarded as far less definitive than the first one.
As to hysteria, I have several things to tell you, which represent clarification and confirmation of my surmise — that initially I defined the etiology too narrowly; the share of fantasy in it is far greater than I had thought in the beginning.
My mother returned today; I have not yet seen her, but heard only that you will take care of poor Mizi,2 which is very kind of you. I have never advised her to see you because she never asked me about it. None of us has a relationship with her; she has always been isolated and rather peculiar. In her mature years this has manifested itself in pathological parsimony, while the rest of us are all spendthrifts. The three girls are hysterical; the youngest, a rather gifted child, severely so. I doubt the father is innocent in this case either; he is half-Asian, suffers from pseudologica fantastica, though he is otherwise good to his family. All of us (with the exception o