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15A
Berlin
8 January 19081
Dear Professor Freud,
First of all, many thanks for your letter. It is good that you are keen to hear “much” from me, for I have a great deal on my mind. I am quite pleased with the beginnings of my practice. I have two cases of obsessional neurosis in treatment, which were recommended by Oppenheim.2 In one of them, where all other means had been applied in vain, Oppenheim has in fact asked me straight out to try your method! It is exactly this case, a severe form of obsessional thinking, that worries me a great deal.3 The patient suffers, (1.) from obsessional praying, (2.) he has to look at every object carefully and to brood over its origin, and, in so doing, he passes over to cosmic problems in the way we know so well. The patient spontaneously produced a very nice screen memory: as a boy of seven, he once chanced to see a woman during a quarrel with neighbours pull up her skirts and show the opposing party her bare buttocks. The patient told the maid at home about this, and she said that he was very naughty and threatened that a policeman would come and fetch him, etc. Thereupon he became very frightened and began to pray, and soon he could not free himself from the compulsion to pray, would cover scraps of paper with all kinds of prayer formulae so as to omit nothing, etc.—I then gradually succeeded in recovering a number of analogous incidents from repression: how as a boy of four he slept with his former wet nurse and pulled her night-dress up over her bottom (here he probably equates breasts and nates4); how he, later on, when his mother once took him into her bed, did the same thing with her, whereupon she scolded him for being indecent. The incident with the woman next-door happened at around the same time! Here the patient was only a witness of an exposure, in the other cases he actively brought it about. That is why this scene is remembered and covers the more embarrassing ones. Then repressed memories followed of how he later sha