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53F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
12 November 1908
Dear Colleague,
Your account of the evening of the talk was very interesting. Things are really not easy for you, but I think you are applying the right technique—treating those people like patients in psychoanalysis, ignoring their “no” with superior calmness, continuing to develop one's view yet not telling them anything from which they are too far because of too much resistance…. After the clear, resolute stand in Dreams and Myths no one can accuse you, of all persons, of making concessions.
The resistance to infantile sexuality strengthens me in the opinion that the Three Essays1 is a work of similar value to that of the Interpretation of Dreams (the second edition of which you will, I hope, be receiving next week; the book is out, but I have no copies yet). Moll's piece is as pitiful as it is dishonest. You see that I am in form today. I did not know, incidentally, that you had sent Jung your paper.
Unless the most improbable changes take place in the meantime, I will stay away from the Congress in Vienna and will also prevent my hotheads here from making an appearance. If you wish to present something, that is a different matter; you possess the necessary self-control and superiority. But you will not derive much pleasure from it either, and I do not want to grant my dear Viennese the pleasure of a battle in which we will be shouted down. But our absence will annoy them, and that suits me just right. As an opportunity to have you with us here again, this time with your wife, the Congress would suit me very well, however.
I am now working on a “General Methodology of Ψα”.2, 3 Where it is to be published is not yet settled, but in any case it will appear—perhaps exclusively—in the second volume of my Schriften zur Neurosen-lehre.4 Unfortunately I have so little time that work is making only very slow progress. A happy event in my family, my daughter's engagement to a young man of her choice,5 also does not exactly increase l