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Csorbató1
July 13, 1917
Dear Frau Lou
I have to disappoint you. I am not going to say “yes” or ‘“no,” nor shall I deal out question marks, but I shall do what I have always done with your comments: enjoy them and let them have their effect on me. It is quite evident that you anticipate and
complement me each time, how you try in a visionary way to complete my fragments, build them into a structure. I am under the impression that this is true to a special degree since I began employing the concept of the narcissistic libido. Without this, I feel you too might have slipped away from me to the system-builders, to Jung, or rather to Adler. But through the ego-libido you have observed how I work, step by step, without the inner need for completion, continually under the pressure of the problems immediately on hand and taking infinite pains not to be diverted from the path. It seems that in this way I have gained your confidence.
If I should be in the position to continue building up this theory, you may perhaps recognize with satisfaction several new things as having been anticipated or even announced by yourself. But in spite of advancing age I am not in a hurry.—
I am sitting here in the Tatra, shivering. If there is anything like a cold paradise, this is it, but in paradise it must be warm, even rather hot, and the wind must blow warm, not as a cold storm which tries to carry off one's notepaper while one writes. And if one were going to write in paradise, certainly not in a Lodenmantel. The world blockade and the promise of sufficient food have driven us here. On the whole [we] are really quite comfortable. Csorbató means “Lake Csorba.” The summits of the high Tatra gaze down on me threateningly while I dare to denounce weather and climate. Have I already told you that I have been suggested for the Nobel Prize? I don't think I shall live to see it, even if the postponement of its distribution should come to an end.
With cordial greetings
Your
Freud
Resort