Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, November 20, 1926

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
November 20, 1926

Dear Jones

Can it possibly be twenty years since you joined the psychoanalytical movement? It has really become entirely yours, for you have achieved everything that could be gained from it: a society, a journal, and an institute.1 What you have meant to it we may leave to the historians to establish. That you can mean still more I feel quite sure, once the many business activities you complain of have turned into a smooth routine. Then you will find the leisure to offer more of your accumulated experience to your colleagues and to posterity.

We have reason to be well satisfied with each other. I myself have the impression that you sometimes overestimate the significance of the dissensions that have cropped up even between us. It is hard, after all, to succeed in satisfying each other completely; one misses, and is critical of, something in everyone. You yourself have pointed out that there were also differences of opinion between Abraham and myself-it is much the same thing as with one's wife and children; only funeral orators deny these traces of reality; the living have the right to assert that such criticism of an ideal picture doesn't interfere with their enjoyment of reality.

You will be surprised when I reveal the reasons that hamper my correspondence with you. It is a classic example of the petty restrictions to which our nature is subject. I find it really very difficult to write German in Latin characters as I am doing today. All fluency-on a higher level it is called inspiration-leaves me at once. But you have often told me that you cannot read Gothic script, which leaves me with but two means of communication, both of which impair the sense of intimacy: either to dictate the letter to Anna on the typewriter, or to use my clumsy English….

My general condition is turning me away from work, I am inclined to think for good. It is just as well not to deceive oneself. I