Letter from Freud to Fliess, June 20, 1898

Vienna, June 20, 1898
IX., Berggasse 19

Dear Wilhelm,

As compensation, a few little things for you. Martin again had a nosebleed exactly on the twenty-eighth day, according to Martha. I, too, am becoming interesting. My head and your head are evidently, even though unsteady, two very different heads, because mine, in spite of all its lability, did not prevent me from having a good period. But I can do something that you cannot do — replace headaches or cardiac pains with ridiculous back pains, which are deceptively like cardiac pains, are precipitated by the same slight provocations, pierce and burn, and extend to several skin areas of the legs, just as the cardiac pains extend into the left arm. An excellent exchange, though!

I came back this morning from Aussee, where I found my poor family with colds and frozen stiff. They do not want to go to Aussee again in spite of its beauties. I find there is enough work here until the end of the month.

I have not yet ceased mourning the lost dream. As if in spite, I recently had a substitute dream in which a house constructed of building blocks collapsed (“We had built a staatliches house”)1 and which, because of this connection, could not be used.

There is no doubt that this has to do with a poetic defense against the memory of a [sexual] affair with the sister. Strange, though, that this [defense] proceeds exactly as it does in neurosis. All neurotics create the so-called family romance (which becomes conscious in paranoia); it serves on the one hand the need for self-aggrandizement and on the other as a defense against incest. If the sister is not one's mother's child, one is relieved of all blame. (The same applies if one is oneself the child of other people.) Where does the material for creating the romance — adultery, illegitimate child, and the like — come from? Usually from the lower social circles of servant girls. Such things are so common among them that one is never at a loss for materi