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56A
Berlin
18 December 1908
Dear Professor,
You must not assume that I expect you to reply letter for letter. The reprint you sent was in itself a sign of life that gave me much pleasure.
The review in the Neurologisches Centralblatt does not, of course, give an accurate picture of the discussion after my lecture. My reply to Ziehen was sharper; I did not put the exact words into my own report, because the printed word gives a quite different impression from the spoken word. In Berlin the signs of a germinating understanding are increasing. After a session this week, for example, several professional colleagues offered me observations from their practice, and the points of view I was expounding to them were not rejected at all. In Oppenheim's polyclinic, which I often visit, I have the same experience. I have high hopes of the psychoanalysis of a case that I began a week ago. It is that of a seventeen-year-old boy belonging to the Jewish aristocracy. For five years he has suffered, among other symptoms, from an obstinate localized backache, and also from sexual neurasthenic troubles. He was in the hands of orthopaedic surgeons etc. for nearly five years; then under Oppenheim, who treated him with radium etc., and who finally referred him to me. He is related to two of Oppenheim's assistants. It would make a great deal of difference if I were successful in this case, which has been given a very unfavourable prognosis by everyone. The beginning looks promising. I am taking particularly exact notes because the case is of the greatest interest, especially concerning the appearance of certain symptoms within one family. No other analysis has yet given me so much pleasure. The patient, whom O. described as very inaccessible, is very interested and very happy to have been freed from his nightly anxiety attacks and pollutions since his second session with me.
A strange endemic cluster of Freudians has been in existence for about a month in Charlottenburg. One of my first patients