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Vienna, January 3, 1899
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear Wilhelm,
So I am the first to give news of himself after all. After the fall of the meteor gleams a light that brightens the gloomy sky for a long while thereafter. For me it is not yet extinguished. In this brightness, then, I suddenly glimpsed several things, and then even the first professional vexations of the New Year could not disturb my good mood.
In the first place, a small bit of my self-analysis has forced its way through and confirmed that fantasies are products of later periods and are projected back from what was then the present into earliest childhood; the manner in which this occurs also emerged — once again by a verbal link.1
To the question “What happened in earliest childhood?” the answer is, “Nothing, but the germ of a sexual impulse existed.” The thing would be easy and a pleasure to tell you, but writing it out would take half a sheet2 so [I shall keep it] for our congress at Easter, together with other elucidations of the story of my early years.
In the second place, I have grasped the meaning of a new psychic element which I conceive to be of general significance and a preliminary stage of symptoms (even before fantasy).
January 4. I got tired yesterday, and today I cannot go on writing along the lines I intended because the thing is growing. There is something to it. It is dawning. In the next few days there certainly will be some additions to it. I shall write you then, when it has become transparent. I want to reveal to you only that the dream schema is capable of the most general application, that the key to hysteria as well really lies in dreams. I now also understand why in spite of all my efforts I have not yet finished the dream [book]. If I wait a little longer, I shall be able to present the psychic process in dreams in such a way that it also includes the process in the formation of hysterical symptoms. So let us wait.
Something pleasant about which I had meant to write you yesterday was sent