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Vienna, October 14, 1900
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear Wilhelm,
You now have wife and child back home again, and you surely know that I saw and spoke to both of them for a moment. Robert was superb and with his divinely crude candor — not directed at me — reminded me of Paul Hammerschlag.1 Si parva licet componere magnis.2 May he retain it for a long time. Your wife obviously took the difficulties of her sick mother very much to heart. It really is something indescribably distressing, and when I heard that there were unnamed reasons against the journey to Berlin, I wondered whether it would not be best to persuade you to have nothing further to do with the treatment. She does not lose anything thereby, because what you want cannot happen. And perhaps she may gain something, because Breuer might do on his own what he would never do on request. I know him, he cannot be influenced, and it is not possible to break with him.
But I am personally far too involved to have a reliable opinion. As you said yourself, you are now asking my pardon for all sorts of thoughts you had about my relationship with him, and Ida has never before so quickly and so frequently agreed with me in all sorts of things — which inwardly must be a displacement of the one unadmitted correction. I wish there had been a more harmless occasion to be proved right. So I must take great pains not to look like an agitator. I really suffered a great deal before I tore myself away from him; an additional factor was the difficulty I had in gaining some understanding of his behavior, which you can now do without trouble.