Letter from Sigmund Freud to Minna Bernays, February 7, 1886

Paris
February 7, 1886

My dear Minna

I had finished writing you a short, gay letter on Tuesday evening, was too lazy to mail it the same day, and by the following morning this became impossible on account of the news I received from Rosa. Your sad romance has come to an end, and when I think it over carefully I can only consider it fortunate that the news of Schönberg's death should reach you after such a long time of estrangement and cooling off. Let us give him his due by admitting that he himself tried and succeeded in sparing you the pain of losing your lover, even though it was less his high-minded intention than the moral weakness of his last years that prompted him to do so.

You will soon have forgotten the grievance his memory still evokes, and then you will tell yourself that you lost a good, noble and affectionate man without it being his or your fault. Oh, his rigidity and whatever it was that seemed to impede the intimate and undisturbed development of your relationship-none of this would have occurred had he been allowed to enjoy good health. In my opinion the most terrible aspect of this disease is that it destroys a human being before it makes him suffer. Can you visualize the change he must have undergone before he could misunderstand his condition as much as he did during his last months? Everyone suffering from this disease lives in the certain hope of recovering in the immediate future. Whenever a patient in the hospital asked to be discharged because he was feeling so well, we knew that he would be dead within twenty-four hours. Nature isn't always so charitable toward her victims.

I have no desire to conjure up before you again the memories that must in any case be with you now, nor to tell you how everything