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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
October 8, 1936
Dear Friend
Your lecture 1 was a pleasant surprise. Those who listened to it and reported to me were apparently unaffected; it must have been too difficult for them. Reading it I enjoyed your beautiful style, your erudition, the breadth of your horizon, your tact in contradicting me. When it comes to praise one can take unlimited quantities, as everyone knows.
Of course I don't believe you. I have always lived on the ground floor and in the basement of the building—you maintain that on changing one's viewpoint one can also see an upper floor housing such distinguished guests as religion, art, and others. You are not the only one; most cultivated specimens of homo natura think likewise. In this respect you are the conservative, I the revolutionary. If I had another life of work ahead of me, I would dare to offer even those high-born people a home in my lowly hut. I already found one for religion when I stumbled on the category “neurosis of mankind.” But we are probably talking at cross purposes and it will be centuries before our dispute is settled.
In cordial friendship and with greetings to your wife
Your
Freud
“Freuds Auffassung des Menschen im Lichte der Anthropologie” (“Freud's Conception of Man in the Light of Anthropology”), lecture given in honor of Freud's eightieth birthday in Vienna.