Letter from Ludwig Binswanger to Freud, January 7, 1929

Kreuzlingen, 7 January 1929

166B

Dear Professor Freud,

I am not writing to you at the beginning of the year to bother you with New Year greetings, but to tell you how often I have thought of you this past year and how much I am with you in spirit. Don't hold it against me if I also take the opportunity to wish you all the best for 1929. You have long since attained philosophical calm, and removed from the hustle and bustle of the world, so that all I need wish you is your continued well-being, in the hope that since I last saw you your health has indeed remained good. As far as I know you have no cause to worry about your family, since I hear nothing but good of your sons, know nothing but good about your daughter, and Frau Professor also seemed very well when I saw her. I too have little cause for complaint as far as health matters are concerned. The children are all doing very well. Little Johannes1 continues to dwell in spirit in our midst. The eldest2 is already in his fourth term of studying medicine, and despite marked talents in the fields of mathematics and physics, could not be dissuaded from remaining true to the family psychiatric tradition. My responsibilities in the clinic have if anything been increasing with time, as they are recognised more and more clearly and our limitations felt ever more keenly. However, I have very good assistants at present, including a married couple, friends of mine,3 both of them psychiatrists and Bleuler's pupils. The new edition of my General Psychology takes up a great deal of my time because I believe I owe it to myself to do a thorough revision of the work, still rather callow and too theoretical and didactic, and above all to bring it into greater accord with psychiatric and psychoanalytical practice. My development has been the very opposite of that of so many others, inasmuch as, with growing experience, I have become if anything less theoretical and turn more and more to practice.