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Vienna, February 15, 1901
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear Wilhelm,
I shall no more get to Rome at Easter than you will. It was only your remark that explained the meaning of what otherwise was for me an unintelligible interpolation in my last letter. Behind it was surely a reminder of the promise you gave in better times to hold a congress with me on classical soil. I knew very well that such a reminder was quite out of place at the moment. I was only escaping from the present into the most beautiful of my former fantasies, and I myself noticed which one it was. Meanwhile the congresses themselves have become relics of the past; I myself am doing nothing new and, as you write, have become totally estranged from what you are doing.
All that is left for me to do is rejoice from a distance when you announce that the presentation of the great solutions is close at hand and express satisfaction with the progress of your work. So you are absolutely right to reserve all further communication on the nasal relationships for this wider context [that is, Fliess's book].
The “Psychology of Everyday Life” will also be finished in a few days, and then both essays will be corrected, sent off, and so on. All of it has been written with a certain gloomy heaviness,1 traces of which it will not be possible to hide. The third piece I have started is something quite harmless — really a thin soup of the poor. I am collecting my notes on neurotics that I have seen during consulting hours to show what even such necessarily superficial observation reveals about the connections between vita sexualis and neurosis and to comment on them. In other words, I am doing roughly the same thing Gattel did at the time he made himself so unpopular in Vienna. Since I need new cases and my practice is very sparse indeed, I have only six examples in my collection so far and those are not the best. I have also introduced testing for left-handedness — with the dynamometer [for testing hand strength] and threading needles.