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11F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
26 November 19071
Dear Colleague,
I have read your excellent paper2 with satisfaction, and, having already previously acknowledged the justification of your basic idea, I can now praise the clarity with which you describe the differences in the concepts of infantile traumas, the relationship between pleasure, silence, and guilt feelings, and the like. To your description of the abnormality of subsequently neurotic children (quantitative increase of libido, precocity, rampant growth of phantasies) I should like to add as an essential feature the existence of a strong tendency to repression, otherwise we should get, not neurotics, but scoundrels. The proof of this pair of opposites, to an extremely high degree and in split form, seems to me to be the latest result of analysis to date.
I would like to get as much as possible from your visit to Vienna and therefore ask you to include in your programme a whole Sunday on which you would be my guest. On weekdays I have hardly a free hour in the evening, and then of course I am not very good company. I would appreciate to know a few days in advance on which Sunday I may expect you.
Yours with sincere regards,
Dr Freud
The translation is based on the text as in the German edition of Freud & Abraham, 1965; the letter is missing in the holdings of the Library of Congress [= LOC].
On the following day Freud mentioned Abraham's article at the meeting of the Wednesday Society (see letter 13A, 21 December 1907, n. 1; Nunberg & Federn, 1962: p. 233).