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15 March 1912
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
63F
Prof. Dr. Freud
Dear Dr. Binswanger,
What an unpleasant surprise that you should be facing an appendectomy. Let us hope that you will recover from it as well as my youngest daughter did.1 But it won't be for months yet, will it?
I have no idea why Kronfeld's essay has made so great an impression in some places.2 I found nothing praiseworthy in it except for its decent bourgeois tone. The assurance with which he refutes psychoanalysis a priori is no greater than that with which any philosopher of any school dismisses all other schools. His objection to the interference of experience is a wretched sophism, and an impertinence besides. I hope that feelings will die down on this topic as well.
And so we are to lose our dear Geheim-Rat [privy councillor] Ziehen3 from Berlin. But why? Do you know anything about it? He must surely be younger than I am.
It upsets me that you have got no further with your work, for now my worry is that it will never be done at all and then your fate will be to retire [zurückziehen] from the battlefield, something which you are even less entitled to do than Ziehen. (I could easily have made a condensation joke4 here.)
Meanwhile, you will have received two more special offprints5 from me, routine stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. Good things do not prosper with such application and such fruitful expectations. I commend our Imago,6 which should be ready in a couple of weeks or so, to your attention. I am now working on an essay on the ‘taboo’ of