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22 February 19251
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
148F
Prof. Dr. Freud
Dear Dr. Binswanger,
Of course I am happy to answer your scientific and personal questions.
The statement that the unconscious of the analysand must be seized
with one's own unconscious, that we must so to speak hold out the unconscious ear as a receiver, was one I made in an unassuming and rationalistic sense, although I grant that important problems are concealed behind that formulation. I simply meant that one must eschew the conscious intensification of certain expectations and so set up in oneself the same state one requires of the analysand. All ambiguities disappear once you assume that, in the sentence in question, the unconscious is meant purely descriptively. In a more systematic formulation, unconscious must be replaced with precon-scious. There is no need to go into the deeper problems here.
I have read several other works by Fechner besides the Psycho-physics but not his ‘Über das Höchste Gut’, in which the pleasure-pain problem is said to play such a great role. I should be most interested to find that I had come close to his views even though I have not been directly influenced by him.
It is true that when I was young I read David Friedrich Strauss and Feuerbach with pleasure and enthusiasm.2 However, it would seem that their influence has not been an enduring one.
I was very glad to have good news of your family. Cordially yours,