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Kreuzlingen, 12 January 1925
145B
Dear Professor Freud,
For some time now I have been wanting to quote to you a passage from a short work Herder wrote in 1778. It could serve as a motto for your life's work and I shall perhaps put it at the beginning of the book on psychoanalysis on which I am working at this moment. The piece which I am no longer able to withhold from you is found in one of Herder's works that also anticipates many other psychoanalytic insights, namely his Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele: Bemerkungen und Träume [On the Recognition and Perception of the Human Soul: Observations and Dreams]. It goes as follows:
‘The greatest truths, like the most wicked lies, the most sublime knowledge and the most hideous mistakes of a people, generally grow from seed corns that are not recognised as such; they are activated by influences that are often taken for the very opposite of what they are. The physician, therefore, who wants to cure ills should seek their foundations; yet when he seeks them there the child or the sick century will not thank him for it. If he delves down to our cherished illness and merely tries to spin a web of health over it - who is greater and more welcome than he is! He is the pillar of all knowledge and all glory. But should he reach for our hearts, for the cherished emotions and foibles which make us feel so good - away with him, that betrayer of mankind, that murderer of our greatest truths and joys! We wanted to be his allies, and be of service to him up there among the treetops,