Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, June 21, 1920

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
June 21, 1920

Dear Pfister

I started reading your little book1 about expressionism with as much interest as aversion, and finished it in one sitting. In the

end I liked it very much, not so much the part that is sheer analysis and which of course cannot overcome the difficulties of an interpretation for the nonanalysts, but what you make of and associate with the subject. It keeps saying to me: What a decent, benevolent man, incapable of any injustice, this Pfister really is, someone with whom you cannot compare yourself, and how pleasant that you can give your approval to everything which he discovers in his own way. For I think you ought to know that in actual life I am terribly intolerant of cranks, that I see only the harmful side of them and that so far as these “artists” are concerned I am almost one of those whom at the outset you castigate as philistines and lowbrows. And in the end you explain quite clearly and exhaustively why these people lack the right to claim the name of artist.

So let me thank you very warmly for this new enrichment to my psychoanalytical hoard.

Your devoted
Freud

P.S. What is your nice son doing?