Letter from Freud to Ludwig Binswanger, January 5, 1909

5 January 1909
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19

2F

Prof. Dr. Freud

Dear Dr. Binswanger,

My best wishes to you in your new home.1 I was very sorry not to have seen you in Zurich,2 but I had all sorts of pressing tasks. This letter carries what is still a hypothetical question but one that may soon become of practical importance: would your clinic be able to take children (from about eight years onwards) who need psychic3 treatment of our kind, i.e., do you have nurses whom you feel you could trust yourself to train for this, as the physician himself will not have an easy time with this kind of treatment? I am thinking, for example, of the young lady who, after you had cured her, became a nurse and who could be assumed to have a special interest in this therapy.4 The analysis of the phobia of a 5-year-old boy5 published in the first half-volume of our Jahrbuch will have drawn your attention to the importance of this type of child therapy.

With kind regards,
Yours, Freud

Notes

Gerhard Fichtner

• Reference to Ludwig Binswanger's and Hertha Fanny Buchenberger's (1880-1971) wedding on 2 April 1908.

• In September 1908, on his way back from London and Berlin, Freud had visited Jung in Zurich and was Jung's guest in the Burghölzli apartment, but did not on that occasion look up Bleuler who also lived in the Burghölzli; cf. Freud (1974a), pp. 171 and 372.

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• This interpretation of the abbreviation ‘ps’ is not certain. Freud usually abbreviated ‘psychoanalytic’, even then, with the Greek letters ψα. However, the interpretation ‘psychotherapeutic’ does not fit the context here.

• Binswanger's [female] patient ‘Irma’ who was treated by Binswanger's uncle, Otto B. from February till the end of May 1907 and finally (from 29 May till 20 September) was analysed there by Ludwig Binswanger. In mid-December 1907 Irma took up a nursing post in a hospital, but became ill again in May 1908 and had to give up her nursing career for the time being. From au