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23 November 1911
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
60F
Prof. Dr. Freud
Dear Dr. Binswanger,
How kind of you to think of me in your military prison.1 I gave myself time until I knew that you were at liberty again and back at home.
Your decision to go back to the work you had given up is very welcome news. I was disappointed when you declined my offer so soon after I gave you my support. Not that I looked for a practical result from your efforts; I believe one generation will have to pass before the next can heed your exhortations; but I think it worthwhile for you and reassuring for us that you should be writing like that. If you now believe that we of the Psychoanalytic Association are only good for cultural fertiliser, and will have to die out first, then that, too, does not trouble my egoism. I shall have gone by then anyway, and as far as the intellectual goal is concerned, I need merely honour the achievement, not the means to it. But I don't really share your view and consider your prognosis heretical. Perhaps you are merely justifying your own slight reservations about the Association. I have the impression that we are in a phase of quiet progress along a gentle incline, to be followed by a more impetuous spurt, the Association being a large part of the driving force.
I have been told nothing at all about the frictions in Zurich.2 I am left in peace at the moment in Vienna, though I was certainly not impartial. Everything would be perfect, except that as a result of the bitter smear campaign my practice is not large enough to keep my colleagues well supplied. I shall console myself with the fact that, as I know from experience, patients do not start sounding the alarm in the autumn until the weather has turned bad. This year, November has been unusually fine.
J. v. T. remains completely unmoved in his mania by his mother's death. We expect that he will soon be paying for this with an exceptionally severe attack, and he himself is aware of this.
It is good to hear that your littl