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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
February 20, 1930
Dear Dr. Roback
I hasten to acknowledge receipt of your book, Jewish Influence, etc.,1 and to thank you for it. Nor have I delayed reading the enclosed reprint and at least glancing through the book.
I cannot refrain from confessing to a certain disappointment. You do me great honor in the book; you mention my name among the greatest of our people (which goes far beyond my ambition) and so on; [but] in the essay (“Doctrine of Lapses”) you express disbelief about just that part of psychoanalysis which has most readily found general recognition. How then are you going to judge our far less attractive discoveries? My feeling is that if your objections to my interpretation of lapses is justified, then I have very little claim to be mentioned with Bergson and Einstein among the intellectual giants. You realize what I am aiming at. I wish neither to be crowned with the Nobel Prize nor to be discussed in every newspaper; I hope to have gained a useful piece of new insight.
I haven't yet read the paragraph about psychoanalysis in your book; I am afraid to find in it incorrect statements which I shall regret. In some of your assertions I recognize myself as little (for instance, no one has so far reproached me with “mystical leanings,” and over the question of hypnosis I sided against Charcot, even if not entirely with Bernheim)2 as I do in the appalling picture of my physical appearance which you have included.