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2F
Prof. Dr Freud
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
7 July 1907
My dear Colleague,
I have read your acute and, what is more important, conclusive remarks1 with quite special interest. Before I deal with them, there is just one possibility that I should like to clear out of the way, namely that you should not regard remarks of mine such as “That we knew already” or “I came to a similar conclusion” as making any claim, in whatever
direction. Please also consider yourself at liberty to make use of my observations in any way you wish. You have, of course, been spared the mistake, through which I had to pass, of considering sexual traumas to be the specific aetiology of neurosis.2 At that time I did not yet know that these experiences are very common, and when I discovered this, I was still fortunately able to turn to the psycho-sexual constitution. But it is really salutary that work on these sexual traumas should be undertaken by someone who, unlike me, has not been made uncertain by that first great error. For you, as for me, the compelling thing is that these traumas become the form-giving factor in the symptomatology of neurosis.
There is one consideration that I must not withhold from you that is certainly valid in the case of hysteria—I do not know whether it also applies to dementia præcox. The hysteric later moves very far away from infantile auto-erotism, he exaggerates his object-cathexis (in this he is the counterpart of the fully demented case, who, in our assumption, reverts to auto-eroticism). He accordingly fantasizes his need of objects back into his childhood and clothes his auto-erotic childhood in phantasies of love and seduction. Rather like lovers who can no longer imagine that there was ever a time when they did not know each other and construct earlier meetings and relations on a flimsy basis, i.e. a part of the sexual traumas reported by patients are or may be phantasies; distinguishing them from the very frequent genuine ones is not easy, and the complication o