Letter from Ludwig Binswanger to Freud, November 7, 1909

7 November 1909

18B

Dear Professor Freud,

I hear that you have returned from your travels1 and would like to welcome you back to Europe. I can hardly wait to hear in due course from Dr. Jung about your journey and your impressions.

I am dictating this letter during a spell of enforced leisure due to a fall from a horse. It happened almost four weeks ago now and still

the effects refuse to vanish completely. I had spinal concussion and severe contusions on my back. There has been a great deal of time for reading and I have also worked on last summer's analysis, about which I wrote to you once.2 That case had a successful outcome. The patient is now a happy bride and feels very well. The case has made a most favourable impression on my father and on the patient's family. I have learned an enormous amount from it and for the first time have come to appreciate the infantile element properly. It is precisely because of the emergence of the infantile factor that this analysis forms a good counterpart to Irma's. In respect of the contents, too, there are links between the two cases; I was able above all to apply the information you gave me about Irma very usefully to the new case. For, ultimately, all the boot-heel symptoms reflected the mother complex, and, moreover, the infantile as well as the maternal component. The tearing away of the heel from the boot was a symbol of both the patient's own birth and also of her giving birth to a child. The heel invariably represents the child, the boot the mother. I really cannot imagine in what other way this case, which has been going on for 18 years (from the age of 5), could have been cured. The analysis became a rare pleasure for me towards the end. Apart from this case, I unfortunately had few opportunities to engage in analysis last summer, because my work in the clinic took up a great deal of time (one of the physicians was ill over a long period). At the moment I am supposed to continue work on a case which Frank3 has long bee