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25A
Berlin
4 April 1908
Dear Professor Freud,
This time you have had to wait a long time for my reply. I deliberately delayed my letter until the manuscript of Dreams and Myths was finished. It was finally sent off today by registered post and should reach you in a few days. The work on myths gave me great pleasure, especially since my former philological interests were revived a little.1 The material certainly merits much fuller treatment. I feel like doing some work on a specific cycle of myths possibly sometime later. First of all, though, I wait to hear your opinion. My expositions are, naturally, based entirely on yours, and I very much hope that you will agree with the conclusions I drew for the myth from the interpretation of dreams, etc. I am naturally very interested to know whether the paper will appear soon. Or do I have to wait until Jung and Rank are published? Rank's subject is certainly very fruitful. If you have not come across it yet, I should like especially to draw your attention to the Samson legend and to Steinthal's2 paper on it ( “Die Sage von Simson”, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, Vol. 2, 1862). Riklin's paper reached me just as I had finished mine. It is a pity that the style is so irritating; it does not do justice to the content.
Now I must thank you for the two reprints. A few days before I received the “Sexualmoral”,3 I heard a lecture on “Medizin und Überkultur” by our new clinician, His4 (successor to Leyden5), which is the complete opposite of your paper. Not one word on sexuality in the whole lecture! Yet it was a most learned paper, which drew on all sorts of material not directly connected with medicine. Summa summarum,6 only a spate of words as a cover for sexual repression. Soon after that I read your paper. How differently this sign strikes me!7
I had already found the paper on anal erotism in the journal a few days before your parcel arrived. It will arouse a great deal of headshaking.8 The description prec