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2 April 1928
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
164F
Prof. Dr. Freud
Dear Dr. Binswanger,
I have received your short dream book and have read it through without stopping. It is splendid and very characteristic of you. I have found all your qualities confirmed in it, the respectable ones no less than those that are less to my taste, your thoroughness, your tendency to agree with people, your cool head, and finally your correctness in face of the real object.
I was sorry to learn that I had missed so many important sources in my review of the dream literature.1 No one had drawn my attention to them; moreover, even as it was, I found it difficult to study so many authors, instead of the object. I obviously lack the scholar's nature and can admire your scholarship without envy.
You will perhaps be surprised to hear that I have not read the analysis of myself carried out by Michaelis2 whom you praise so highly. To analyse somebody [in public] who is still alive is hardly admissible, let alone polite. I shall leave aside the question of whether failure to send the victim the result of the autopsy aggravates or mitigates the incivility. I was not curious, since this Michaelis does not know me. I must say that our clinical analyses presuppose greater familiarity with the object.
Your concluding words3 amused rather than annoyed me. So you, too, have a God. No doubt one who has been philosophically distilled. Now, I have always been quite temperate, almost abstinent, but have