Letter from Freud to Fliess, August 31, 1898

Aussee, August 31, 1898

Dear Wilhelm,

At noon today I leave with Martha for the Adriatic; whether we shall stay in Ragusa, Grado, or somewhere else will be decided on the way. “The way to gain riches,” according to an apparently eccentric but wise saying,” is to sell your last shirt.” The secret of this restlessness is hysteria. In the inactivity here and in the absence of any fascinating novelty, the whole business has come to weigh heavily on my soul. My work now appears to me to have far less value, and my disorientation to be complete; time — another entire year has gone by without any tangible progress in the theory — seems incommensurate with what the problem demands. Moreover, it is the work on the success of which I have staked my livelihood. True, the results have been good, but perhaps only indirectly, as though I had applied the lever in a direction that indeed yields to the line of cleavage of the stuff;1 what the latter is, however, I do not yet know. So I am running away from myself to gather as much energy and objectivity as is possible, because, indeed, I cannot let the work go.

Things are better in regard to psychology. I found the substance of my insights stated quite clearly in Lipps, perhaps rather more so than I would like. “The seeker often finds more than he wished to find!”2 Consciousness is only a sense organ; all psychic content is only a representation; all psychic processes are unconscious. The correspondence [of our ideas] is close in details as well; perhaps the bifurcation from which my own new ideas can branch off will come later. So far I have worked my way through less than a third [of his book]. I stopped at “sound relationships.” This always vexed me because here I lack the most elementary knowledge, thanks to the atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities. The big news of the day, the czar's manifesto, also touched me personally.3 Years ago I diagnosed that the young man — fortunately for us — suffers from obsessional ideas, is overly kin