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Kreuzlingen, 11 April 1924
142B
Dear Professor Freud,
I regret very much that I shall not be able to attend the Salzburg Congress1 since next week we are due to leave for Rome, after which I am expected back here by a specific date. I should very much have liked to see you in Salzburg, but would like even more to meet you in Vienna. I still hope that will be possible one day. At the moment I am so deep in the preparation of the theoretical part of my next book, which will be devoted in the main to psychoanalysis, that I keep conversing with you in spirit.2 But quite apart from that, I often long to be with you.
With kindest regards to you, your wife and your daughter Anna,
As always, yours, [L.Binswanger]
The 8th International Psychoanalytic Congress, Salzburg, 21-23 April 1924. Freud also was unable to attend this congress owing to an attack of influenza; see Jones (1953-7), Vol. 3, pp. 69ff. and pp. 106ff.
Binswanger wrote about this in his Reminiscences: ‘I still have my very extensive, unpublished, manuscripts recording these “conversations”. Since they bear witness to my continually coming to grips with Freud's intellectual world, perhaps I may briefly refer to them. Entitled “Freud's Psychology and the Structure of Personality”, they deal first with the definition of the psychic in Freud, that is to say, with its “meaningfulness”. It is generally known that Freud interprets “meaning” [Sinn] as “significance, intent, tendency, and place within a chain of psychic connections”. I analysed all these terms in detail on the basis of my Probleme der allgemeinen Psychologie [Problems of General Psychology] and followed this with a lengthy discussion of Freud's description of the psychic life, which centres around the theory of the psychic conflict and the psychic agencies, i.e., in a personification and dramatisation of the life of the psyche, and which has never before been carried out so systematically and so penetratingly. […]
‘I have not published any