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Kreuzlingen, 15 February 1925
147B
Dear Professor Freud,
Your letter, as always, has given me great pleasure. The news that you intend revising The Interpretation of Dreams for the Collected Works in person is very welcome, for that book holds the same central position among your works as The Critique of Pure Reason holds among Kant's. One is loath to see a stranger's hand in works of this sort. Incidentally, I have not yet congratulated you on your Collected Works. I think it is very well done and worthy of you in every respect, both in its appearance and in the way the material has been arranged!1
You ask after my family. Everyone is well, thank God. None of our six children has so far given us the least cause for worry and we sometimes wonder how long this can go on, surrounded as we are here by the misfortunes of others. I consider myself especially favoured by fate because my oldest son is showing the same interest in the Greeks and in philosophy2 as I have had since early youth. And though I continue to be his mentor and teacher in these fields, my lack of mathematical and astronomical aptitude and education affords my son opportunity enough to triumph over his father and to restore the necessary equilibrium.
I should like, if I may, to ask you a few questions that have arisen from my work and which you must answer or not depending on your mood, free time and state of health. I am content simply to put them to you.
I have long been impressed by your remark that the analyst's unconscious must be as passive towards the analysand as the telephone receiver is to the transmitting plate,3 etc. I fully understand this pronouncement as a technical principle, but I have always wondered on what ‘capacity’ or intellectual faculty you think that this type of ‘understanding’ is really based. The reply: ‘on the unconscious itself’, would be circular and no real answer. You have to postulate a uniform intellectual disposition, equal in all people, and assume that, provided this di