You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
June 11, 1923
Dear Katà and dear Lajos
Anna has gone away for the night on a nursing job and has charged me to thank you for suggesting your visit during this
month. I also owe Lajos an acknowledgment for his letter about Ferenczi's operation, which was written with his usual clarity and assurance.
About my operation and affliction there is nothing to say that you yourselves couldn't know or expect. The uncertainty that hovers over a man of sixty-seven has now found its material expression. I don't take it very hard; one will defend oneself for a while with the help of modern medicine and then remember Bernard Shaw's warning:
Don't try to live for ever, you will not succeed.
(The Doctor's Dilemma)
But now there is something else. We brought here from Hamburg Sophie's younger son, Heinele, now aged 41/2. My eldest daughter Mathilde and her husband have almost adopted him and have fallen in love with him to an extent that couldn't be foreseen. He was indeed an enchanting little fellow, and I myself was aware of never having loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much. Unfortunately he was very weak, never entirely free of a temperature, one of those children whose mental development grows at the expense of its physical strength. We thought that in Hamburg he lacked the proper kind of care or medical supervision.
This child became ill again two weeks ago, temperature between 102 and 104, headaches, no clear local symptoms, for a long time no diagnosis, and finally the slow but sure realization that he has a miliary tuberculosis, in fact that the child is lost. He is now lying in a coma with paresis, occasionally wakes up, and then he is so completely his own self that it is hard to believe…. After each waking and going to sleep one loses him all over again; the doctors say it can last a week, perhaps longer, and recovery is not desirable, fortunately not likely. His father arrived yesterday.
I find this loss very hard to bear. I don't think I