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Kreuzlingen, 4 May 1926
151B
Dear Professor Freud,
From your latest book, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,1 which absorbed me during my spring break on the shores of Lake Lugano, I can see that, having recovered your physical strength, you continue to pursue your chief scientific problems with youthful intellectual vigour and critical acumen, to substantiate them afresh and to defend them against the unsustainable distortions of others. And so it is with particular happiness that I congratulate you, dear Professor, on behalf of my wife and myself, on the occasion of your 70th birthday. On this day, when you are being feted throughout the world and are receiving felicitations from all corners of the globe, I shall spare you my wishes and reflections and simply express my feelings of gratitude and affection, and once again my pleasure that fate should have granted me this opportunity of congratulating you on your 70th birthday.
Your life, though always on the ascendant, has repeatedly been dealt heavy blows. And so I should just like to tell you that I deeply lament the wound fate has inflicted upon you in the death, at so early an age, of Karl Abraham.2 Abraham was one of the few who fully understood the libido theory and applied it correctly, and one of the few to have developed it clinically with lasting results. Since I witnessed all the stages in the development of your relationship with Jung, I realise only too clearly what it must mean to you to have lost your scientific heir for the second or third time.