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Grundlsee, Rebenburg
September 16, 1930
Dear Friend
Above all my warm thanks for your beautiful words about the death of my mother. It has affected me in a peculiar way, this great event. No pain, no grief, which probably can be explained by the special circumstances—her great age, my pity for her helplessness toward the end; at the same time a feeling of liberation, of release, which I think I also understand. I was not free to die as long as she was alive, and now I am. The values of life will somehow have changed noticeably in the deeper layers.
I did not go to the funeral; Anna represented me there, too. Today she went on a Swiss-Italian tour with her friend Dorothy,1 for which I wish her better weather.
The gruesome newspaper reports about my health will probably have reached you, too. I find them very interesting as a proof of the difficulty of forcing upon the general public something it doesn't like. For they are the reaction to the Goethe Prize and must warn us against the illusion that the resistance to psychoanalysis has subsided in a practical, tangible way. The same style of reaction is also