You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
B., August 27, 1899
Dear Wilhelm,
Many thanks; I have just received the two pages from Harzburg, which will of course be copied exactly when the revised proofs come
back to me. You will have several more occasions to red-pencil similar instances of superfluous subjectivity. Your looking through the proofs is indeed a tremendous reassurance to me.
I am completely useless in all other respects, which you will understand easily. Nothing but the dream [book]. I took a stack of writing paper in manuscript form (including fifty-six new pages, dream interpretations, examples) to the post office yesterday and already the need for preparatory work on the last and most thorny chapter, the psychological one, is making itself felt; but I do not yet know how to delineate and organize it. I should also do some reading for it; the psychologists will in any case find enough to rail at, but a thing like this turns out just as it will. Every attempt to make it better than it turns out by itself gives it a forced quality. So it will contain 2,467 mistakes — which I shall leave in it.1
I have never regretted the brevity of my vacation so much as this year. In three weeks it will all be over; and then the worries begin again whether some negroes [sic] will turn up at the right time to still the lion's appetite, and thus the mood for writing will be gone. Moreover, the summer is so lovely one cannot work all day long. So I shall certainly not finish it, which is a terrible thought.
You will find Robert's dream later on, in the section on egoism in dreams. Things are going very well here; it is a fair, uninterruptedly beautiful summer. A bit of Italy would be a nice ending to it, but this probably will not come about.
What would you think of ten days in Rome at Easter (the two of us, of course) if all goes well, if I can afford it, and have not been locked up, lynched, or boycotted on account of the Egyptian dream book? A long-standing promise! Learning about the eternal laws of life for the