Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, January 18, 1909

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
January 18, 1909

Dear Sir

I cannot content myself with thanking you for sending me your essay “Delusion and Student Suicide”1; I must also tell you how pleased I am that our psychiatric researches have aroused the interest of a clergyman who has free access to the souls of so many young and healthy* individuals. We often reproach our psycho-analysis half jokingly but actually quite seriously for requiring a state of normality for its application, and for finding a barrier in the organized [organic?] abnormalities of mental life, with the result that psychoanalysis meets the optimum of favorable conditions where its practice is not needed-i.e., among the healthy. Now it seems to me that this very optimum exists in the field in which you work.

Our mutual friend, C. G. Jung, has often mentioned your name to me; I am glad that I am now in a position to associate a more definite idea with that name, and I hope that you will do me the honor of showing me your future essays.

Yours gratefully
Freud