Letter from Sigmund Freud to Arthur Schnitzler, May 14, 1922

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
May 14, 1922

Dear Dr. Schnitzler

Now you too have reached your sixtieth birthday, while I, six years older, am approaching the limit of life and may soon expect to see the end of the fifth act of this rather incomprehensible and not always amusing comedy.

Had I retained a remnant of belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts,” I would not hesitate today to send you the warmest and heartiest good wishes for the years that await you. I shall leave this foolish gesture to the vast number of your contemporaries who will remember you on May 15.

But I will make a confession which for my sake I must ask you to keep to yourself and share with neither friends nor strangers. I have tormented myself with the question why in all these years I have never attempted to make your acquaintance and to have a talk with you (ignoring the possibility, of course, that you might not have welcomed my overture).

The answer contains the confession which strikes me as too intimate. I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double. Not that I am easily inclined to identify myself with another, or that I mean to overlook the difference in talent that separates me from you, but whenever I get deeply absorbed in your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very presuppositions, interests, and conclusions which I know to be my own. Your determinism as well as your skepticism-what people call pessimism-your preoccupation with the truths of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity. (In a small book entitled Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, I tried to reveal Eros and the death instinct as the motivating powers whose interplay dominates all the riddles of life.) So I